


time/too much/none

by jeanjmo



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, M/M, Set in the future, maybe a little explicit at time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:29:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 52,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27252703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeanjmo/pseuds/jeanjmo
Summary: Maru moves back to Pelican town after completing her degree and doesn't know who she is anymore.Alex doesn't realize life is more than a monotonous rut.Shane's sober but that doesn't mean he's good.A story about how personal growth isn't always linear.
Relationships: Alex/Shane (Stardew Valley), Elliott/Harvey (Stardew Valley), Haley/Female Player (Stardew Valley), Haley/Leah (Stardew Valley), Maru/Female Player (Stardew Valley), Penny/Sam (Stardew Valley), Sam/Sebastian (Stardew Valley)
Comments: 78
Kudos: 110





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where this came from, but it came from somewhere and now it's here. I feel like Maru's character gets overlooked a bit and this is a story to explore her potential (but also everyone else's too...). 
> 
> Set several years after the farmer shows up. Switches between villagers perspectives.

Alex tripped over air the first time he saw Maru after she got back. She fought the urge to roll her eyes, instead pretending not to see and turning the page of her book. She was on the beach, sitting in the sand, wearing a bikini. Like any regular girl might do on a hot day. Any regular girl, but not Maru.

Since she’d gotten back not everyone remarked out loud, to her face, about her change – only Marnie with a “those cities boys must be running after you” and Lewis with “don’t you look like quite the young lady” and perhaps not entirely related but Jodi with a “spoken to Sam lately?” as if they’d ever been friends. Most people just gave her sidelong looks, the double take, the I-can’t-believe-it’s-you mouth agape for a second too long stare.

So what if sometimes she wore contacts now, and she’d upgraded her bulky old glasses for a fashionable pair? So what if she stopped using that chemical solution to straighten her hair and let her curls loose? So what if she left the lab long enough to absorb enough vitamin D to bring out the dark dusting of freckles across her nose? So what if being in the city had rubbed off on her and sometimes she wore clothes other than overalls? She wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d grown up. A completely normal biological occurrence and yet everyone was acting like she was some genetic freak. Or like she’d formally been one and this normalcy she exuded now was some miracle of creation.

It was her first summer back in four years. Sure, she’d visited here and there, gone to the holiday parties and the occasional festival – if she could escape her double major in bio-chemistry and engineering for long enough – but apparently those glimpses of her four year alteration hadn’t been taken in. Now that she was back it was like she was new in town. She hadn’t seen the villagers act like this over someone since the farmer had moved in.

After the fifth time Elliot cast a glance over his shoulder at her, Maru snapped her book shut and decided it was time to leave the beach. She stashed the novel in her bag and pulled her sundress over her head. She’d grown accustomed to the anonymity of the city, being unable to go anywhere without being seen – _watched_ she thought gloomily – by someone she knew made her feel cramped, almost edgy. She suddenly understood why Sebastian had only come to the beach in the rain. The realization put a pit in her stomach. Dusting the sand off her bare legs, she made her way back towards town. She had a stop to make before she could find a place to read in peace.

The only person who didn’t seem to notice a change in Maru was Harvey. He was the same as he had always been. Back when she was his assistant, if ever she’d gone into the clinic when she was off work, she would have just walked right into the back. Now she wasn’t sure if she could do that. So when she did walk in - feeling the air conditioner blast her so forcefully she was nearly propelled back out to the scorching heat - she lingered awkwardly by the unattended counter. He’d never replaced her after she’d left.

Should she ring the bell? Should she call out? She was saved from figuring it out by Harvey, who emerged from the door behind the counter balancing a mug and paperwork, mumbling to himself as he read. When he looked up he spilled half his coffee down his white coat.

“ Maru!” He exclaimed, recovering his mug and barely minding the stain. “ What are you doing here?”

“I’m back for the summer. I told you that in my last email that you never answered.” Her tone was accusatory only in jest.

Harvey grimaced, “I’m sorry. Things have been crazy around here.”

“Almost like you should have hired a replacement for me.”

“Yes, well, I’m working on it.” He sighed, placing his clipboard down and taking a sip of coffee.

“It’s been four years.”

He frowns again, “there’s not a lot of qualified applicants.”

Maru just shrugs and pushes the reason she came up onto the counter. It’s a small box wrapped in newspaper.

“What’s this?” Harvey asks, putting down his mug.

She shrugs. “For you.”

“Maru! Why? It’s not my birthday.”

“Well, I missed a few. This hardly makes up for that.”

“Nonsense,” Harvey begins, but Maru cuts him off.

“Just open it.”

He does.

It’s a model T47 airplane from the first Gortoro empire war. A rare model Maru knows Harvey had been searching for, and by the look on his face, had never located.

“Maru, I…” He gets a bit choked up, a dreamy look coming across his face. “Where did you find it?”

“In a friend’s garage. Collecting dust.” She states plainly.

“And they just, gave it away?” He’s incredulous.

Maru smiles lightly, “not everyone appreciates these things like you do.”

Harvey shakes his head in disbelief, “This... this is an amazing gift.”

“Thought you’d like it.”

“I have nothing--”

Just then the door swings open and in walks the farmer. She looks different than the last time Maru saw her. Her hair, buzzed off when they first met, is now in a fashionable mullet, the kind Maru might have seen on one of the arts kids at school, though none of them pulled it off quite so authentically. She’s more tanned, her eyes shining because of it. She looks strong.

There’s a pause in her step when she notices Maru, and without realizing it she steels herself for the usual trip up, the is-that-really-you? But it doesn’t come. The farmer just breaks into a friendly smile.

“Hey. Your mom mentioned you’d be back.”

“How’s the farm?” Maru asks with polite, feigned, interest. She remembers that the farmer never really knew her before she left, would have no reason to react to her apparent metamorphosis like everyone else was inclined to, but it doesn’t change her indifference.

The farmer shrugs, “busy. Been breaking my back. Hence me being here.” She nods at Harvey.

“Yes. I have just a few things to type up and then I’ll be right with you.” Harvey addresses her, and then to Maru, “again, thank you.” He holds up the box, nodding at her. Before he exits he adds, “it’s good to have you back.”

She’s not sure how she feels about that.

Having nothing to say to the farmer, she turns to leave, but Ry starts up. “You know those sprinklers you helped me out with are still going strong.”

She remembers. It was right before she left for school. Ry had only moved in that spring. Maru had been eager, and geeky, happy for a chance to show off her technical knowledge. She was eighteen. She has trouble relating to that person now.

“Yeah?” She says, not able to muster much enthusiasm.

“Yeah. I built a few new ones when I expanded but they always break.” The farmer sheepishly rubs the back of her neck.

Maru feels the bait. Now’s when she’s supposed to offer to come over and fix the problem.

Before she can think of a polite excuse not to, the farmer continues “but I designed the garden beds to retain more water. Built a swale, started channelling grey water. It works well enough.”

Maru raises an eyebrow, “sounds like you’ve made a lot of changes.”

Ry smiles. Not brightly, almost self-consciously. “I’m trying. You can come by sometime and see for yourself.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Maru replies, noncommittally.

Harvey calls Ry into the back and she’s free to leave. She watches the door swing back and forth after the farmer walks through it and wonders briefly if she’ll ever bother to visit the farm. Deciding she probably won’t, she braces herself and pushes out the front door to great the oppressive summer heat.

* * *

Alex watches from the shore as Shane and the farmer race each other past the docks. Neither of them particularly graceful swimmers, laughing too much to hold their breath. He squints, looking for signs. Shane’s body is strong from the exertion of the farm. His once sallow complexion is now evenly tanned from days out in the sun. Alex can assume his hands, around his eyes, are becoming weathered from his work, but he’s too far out to see. Haley might have noticed something about how he’s watching, but she’s not here.

When they turn back towards land Alex wonders if he should leave. Then wonders why that’s his impulse, picks up his book and starts reading again. He realizes he’s turned several pages without taking anything in and flips back. After he knew he wouldn’t go pro he’d felt stupid standing around with his gridball with no one to toss it to, and he’d taken up reading the untouched books on his shelf. Many times he’d tossed them aside in frustration, having a headache and bleary eyes. Then he picked up a copy of _Pride and Prejudice_ and realized not all books are equal.

“Hey Alex.” Ry grins at him, shaking the water out of her hair. Shane only glances at him, eyes falling to the book Alex’s reading. Suddenly he feels exposed, like he’s been caught faking something.

“Hi.” He says dumbly.

“Hot, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Next time you should be the one to race Shane. It’s creating too much competitive aggression between us. Not good for working relations.”

Alex gives a stiff laugh, mumbles something that might have been a “maybe.” Shane is towelling himself off, not even listening.

When Ry bids him farewell and they walk off he can hear them start joking together again, wonders what it is they talk about. He has to admit they both look good, healthy.

* * *

“Did you see Harvey?” Robin asks the second she pushes through the front door. Maru had considered going through the side door straight to her room, like she used to, but somehow it seemed rude to do it now, after she’d only just come back. She didn’t want her parents to know how badly she desired to retreat from them. Not when it didn’t make sense to her, she’d been the one to choose to come back, hadn’t she?

“Yeah.”

“He’s alright?”

“You see him more than I do.”

Robin frowns and Maru wishes she hadn’t said it. “Yes well, you always had a better way of getting him to open up.”

“He’s not _that_ shy, mom.”

Sensing Maru’s unwillingness to speak further on Harvey, Robin changes the topic, “and Penny, have you seen her yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’m sure she’d love to see you, sweetie. I think she must be awfully lonely since Sam left.”

A guilty seed begins to sprout in Maru’s stomach. “I’ve been back less than a day.” She knows it sounds defensive.

“You should bring her one of your dad’s casseroles.”

“You really think inflicting them on the neighbours is the best way to deal with them?”

“Did I hear you mention dinner?” Demetrius pops his head in.

“Uhh no, honey.” Robin frowns. After Maru had left Demetrius had developed an obsession with making the perfect casserole. He believed he could develop the ideal flavour and was certain the key lay in unconventional ingredients, such as void eggs and white algae. The rest of the family didn’t know how to tell him they didn’t want to be his test subjects anymore.

“I’m in the middle of running some tests, I might not be able to get to that super cucumber and fiddlehead lasagna until tomorrow.”

“Oh! Don’t worry dear, I’m happy to cook tonight. You know I always am.” Robin says a little too quickly.

“Care to help me in the lab, Maru?”

“Uh, I can’t right now dad.”

And she slips to the quietness of her own room.


	2. Chapter 2

For a moment it had seemed like Pelican town was in the midst of a renaissance. When it had felt like the population would only dwindle down to nothing, Leah showed up. A bit reclusive, but an artist and _young._ This was potential. This meant a new generation of people might feel the valleys charms. Then Elliot. Another recluse, poor beyond being able to stimulate the local economy at all, but still, _young_ and _new._ Sure, Haley left the second she graduated high school, but nobody had ever expected someone like her to stick around anyway. Besides, Marnie’s nephew was coming to town. And soon after that, after so many years dormant, the farm was occupied again.

Then Maru left. A mass exodus had begun. Abigail skipped out, Sam drove off and then Sebastian followed. Of the young folks of Pelican town only Alex and Penny remained. To make matters worse, it seemed like Leah and Elliot were not anywhere near obtaining a spouse, let alone having kids like the town had so desperately hoped. Shane was a pathetic alcoholic. Not even the good doctor seemed able to settle down and have a family. Joja mart was slowly killing Pierre’s. George died. Evelyn moved into a senior’s home out of town.

The once bustling coastal hub – or maybe not _bustling_ and maybe not a _hub_ per say, but a lively and sweet town to be sure – was now half occupied. Or half empty, as Lewis thought on his darker days. It was strange to be there now, after having grown up in it being full of life. The other towns people had adjusted to the emptiness, but Maru, having been one of the first to leave, having left when things seemed on the up, was struck with it at all once.

Maru _does_ end up bringing Penny one of her dad’s casseroles. If only because it’s a safer place to toss it away, Alex’s old dog Dusty being only meters away.

She knocks on the door, feeling the heat radiating off the metal of the trailer. An anticipatory heat shiver runs through her only thinking about the stagnant humidity that must be inside. She’d always avoided it here, even back in the day.

Pam opens the door a crack, her eyes blood-shot and sagging, her hair untamed. “Whatchya want- oh Maru.”

“Hello Pam-”

“PENNY! Your friend is here.” Pam yells over her shoulder, disappearing back into the dark heat of the trailer.

Maru wonders if she should follow in but decides not to. When Penny appears in the doorway she looks shrunken. Her red hair is in slight disarray, not its usual perfect roll. She’s pale as anything and doesn’t step close enough to the door frame to allow any ray of light to touch her.

“Hi.” She says quietly and Maru wonders if she’s imagining that Penny’s looking down at her with slightly narrowed eyes.

“Hi Pen, I brought you this.” Maru holds up he casserole. Penny stares down at the foil wrapped dish blankly.

“Oh. You didn’t have to.”

“Probably better if I didn’t. It’s cave carrot and squid.”

They stand there a moment, Maru holding the unwanted offering between them. Eventually Penny moves to take it, then steps back into her home.

“I’m sure it’s fine.” She says without emotion.

“Are you busy? Do you want to take a walk?” It’s what they used to do.

“Sorry, I can’t.” She offers no explanation.

“Okay… Um, I’m back for a while. So if you ever want to… I’m around.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Great.”

“Goodnight.”

And she shuts the door.

Maru’s left on the step feeling strange with the realization that even Penny’s being weird with her.

* * *

Shane washes his hands under the cool flow of the mountain spring water gushing from his tap. He turns the faucet, the water stops.

Fixed, he thinks, good.

When he’d taken the job on the farm he hadn’t anticipated what he’d become. The original agreement had been for him to take care of the chickens, part-time. Ry’s reasoning for hiring him being that the stupidity of the birds only brought out her bloodlust, so for the productivity of the farm, she needed someone else to manage them. His job expanded to full-time when she expanded to more livestock. One morning he’d shown up and there were ducks and rabbits cohabiting in the coop and Robin was laying the foundation for a barn.

He’d been scratching his head, wondering how he hadn’t noticed such a large dent out of Marnie’s stock when Ry had come over and told him he better quit joja for good.

“What if I don’t want to?” He’d said, petulantly.

She’d just shrugged, “then don’t.”

He quit that afternoon. Walked out without notice.

He told himself it was only because he relished causing Morris pain, and not because it had anything to do with Ry, or her stupid farm. Though it was plain to anyone that the job suited him. It was quiet and Ry didn’t pester him with meaningless chitchat. Sometimes he’d go three quarters of the day without even seeing her, as she kept to the fruits and vegetables and didn’t have time to spare on conversation. The few times they did have to work on something together - whether it was repairing fences or rotating feed in the silo – they either said nothing or dove right into a specific topic.

They got to know each other slowly. After a year Shane realized there was a confidence shared between them unlike one he’d shared with anyone else. She knew about his miserable past, she knew how hard it was for him to stay sober and how some days he’d think he couldn’t do it anymore, but more than that, she also knew the things he liked, the things that got him excited or as close as Shane ever let himself get. They started sharing lunch together every day and Shane found, shockingly, he looked forward to these times, even cherished them.

A few more seasons passed, and Shane dared to think he might be… happy. Content, at least. What an incredible least to possess. He expected to lose it any second.

“Why’d you hire me? “ He asked her at lunch once. They were eating on her front porch, out of the beating sun, both of them too sweaty and dirty to want to be indoors. 

She’d shrugged, chewing on a sloppy bite, sauce on the corner of her mouth. “I needed help.”

“Yeah but why me? I didn’t apply for the job.”

She swallowed and seemed to think about it. “I just liked you, I guess.”

“I was an asshole to you.” He's not apologizing, just stating the obvious. 

She snorted, “yeah, you were.”

“Then why?” He's surprised by himself, pressing for answer. Normally he's a don't ask don't tell kind of guy. Preferring the cloudy misery of his assumptions. 

“Because I liked you despite it. I don’t know, you ever get the feeling you can just tell about someone?” She lounges back and looks out over the farm with a somewhat thoughtful expression. 

“Hell no. I hate everyone.” Though he's not sure if that's _exactly_ true anymore. 

“Liar.” She quirks a small smile, before glugging down an entire glass of water.

“It’s true. That’s just my gut reaction to everyone I see.”

She snorts, only mildly choking on the dregs of her drink. Recovering, she says, “well, it wasn’t mine. You seemed fucked up and you were an asshole but then I found out you really do know your shit about animals, and I was like _yeah._ ”

“You were desperate," he points out, knowing the truth. 

She shoves him. “Shut up. Well, I was, a little. But that’s not the point. You were a dick to my face and would tell me to fuck off and that’s how I knew you wouldn’t bother me.”

“Logical.” But he does get it, somehow. 

“I mean it. I put on a friendly façade out there, but why the fuck do you think I moved out here? To talk to people? No.” He's not sure if he believes her. She always talks about being so different in the past, being a nervous wreck around people and never knowing what to say, but he can't quite see it. She's more quiet than most people, but when she does talk it never seems forced or awkward. 

“Well, we talk now. Should I go eat my lunch in the barn?”

* * *

After the cows, and the goats, and the sheep, and the pigs, he’d sauntered into work one morning to find Robin laying another foundation.

“Yoba, not another barn I fucking hope?”

Robin startled, whether at his tone or his sudden appearance he wasn’t sure. “No… Not another barn.” She had narrowed eyes like his question didn’t make any sense. He became suspicious. Robin wouldn’t answer his questions, said she had too much work to do.

“What’s the new building for?” He demanded of Ry when he saw her pruning tomatoes later that day.

“What?” She asked lazily, the summer heat making her sluggish.

“What’s Robin building?”

Ry shrugged, “you wanna go for a swim?”

“No.” Even though he did, “you’re not bringing in someone else to work here are you? Because I can handle the animals. I fixed that hole in the fence, last week was a total fluke…”

“I’m not bringing in someone else.”

“If you bring in someone else I’ll quit.”

“Shane, you don’t want to live at Marnie’s forever, do you?” She said it matter-of-factly, examining the scaly green film the tomato pollen left on her fingers.

He opened his mouth to respond but found he was too pissed to say anything. He walked away. He went to the forest and jumped in the lake without her. To cool off, emotionally and physically, but also out of spite.

The cabin she’d had built for him lay dormant, untouched and collecting dust. Shane didn’t speak to Ry for a week, he was so pissed about her organizing his life like that. She never brought up him moving onto the farm again.

He would lay in bed at Marnie’s and stare at the ceiling, listening to her and Jas talk about their days, the future. For so long he’d stared into the void of the future, thinking it was nothing but darkness, the same as all his days were. Then the faint flicker of hope, and the only thing he’d focused on was sobriety, on getting through the day. He’d ticked off almost two years of days without a relapse. Was it time to think of something more for himself?

“I don’t like freebies.” Shane said to Ry one day at work.

“Neither do I.” Ry said plainly, not asking for him to clarify although he wasn’t sure if she knew he was talking about the cabin. They’d been talking again lately, avoiding his housing situation as a subject. It had been mostly normal.

“It’s not an improvement going from being a burden on one person to the next.” He said darkly.

She exhaled as if she were exhausted. “You work for me, Shane. This is essentially a monetary exchange. It means you won’t show up late anymore. I have the space. And I feel better knowing there’s someone close that I trust.”

She trusted him.

He’d never thought of that.

“Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you _ask_ me, at least?”

“Honestly Shane? Because I knew you’d be mad and think I was meddling and I didn’t know how to bring it up.” She shrugged, “I’m not always great at communicating. You know I’m working on it.”

“You’re not just trying to micromanage me and make sure I stay sober out of some fucked up saviour complex you’ve got?”

She rolls her eyes. “You’ve been sober for almost two years, pal. You don’t need me for that.”

He moved into the cabin. He worked full time on the farm. He’d learned to manage more tasks than just the animals, occasionally being trained by Ry or Robin, depending what it was. He was still sober. And he’d just fixed the water line that ran to his cabin without having to consult anyone. He splashed water on his face. He felt good.

Ry came around the corner and stopped in her tracks when she saw him standing by his outdoor sink.

“Oh, you’ve fixed it.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about having power?”

“What?”

“Solar power. I was thinking we should get your cabin hooked up before the days start getting darker.”

“I don’t know, I’ve been enjoying being unconnected from all that.”

“Fair.” She’s thoughtful a second, “so I should tell Alex not to come then?”

“Uh, what?”

“Alex said he’d come over and hook it up, or show you how to I guess.”

Shane wants to accuse her of meddling again, but he’s not sure why he thinks that.

He shrugs nonchalantly, “I mean, if he’s already agreed to come we might as well. A light might be good.”


	3. Chapter 3

Alex is having dinner with them. _Alex is having dinner with them?_

In all of Maru’s memory she can’t draw up a single recollection of this ever happening in the past. Has he ever even been in this house before? She watches him suspiciously from behind her seafood Shepard’s pie. Her parents hadn’t even mentioned to her he was coming. He was just… there.

And it clearly wasn’t the first time.

They’re all comfortable around each other. Her mom is saying things like _how’s the new metal band saw working out for you?_ like she actually _cares_ , and her dad is discussing tool upgrade possibilities that they’ve clearly fledged out previously. And Alex doesn’t even balk for a second at the weirdo Shepard’s pie, just eats it like it’s entirely normal, like his grandma served this thing up all the time.

For the most part Maru doesn’t speak. Nods here and there, volunteers this or that phrase, but she finds herself observing almost the entire meal. She’s good at making observations, though she’s not used to focusing these skills on people. Maybe this behaviour between them was normal? And she’d never noticed before?

After the meal Demetrius has to quickly run back into the lab and Robin gets a late night call from Lewis. Maru and Alex are left to the dishes on their own. She doesn’t try to say anything to him, because why would she?

He’s the first to speak, drying a plate that looks miniature in his massive hands, focusing on it instead of her. “Sorry I didn’t come say hi at the beach the other day. It’s just… well…” He’s got this thoughtful quasi-embarrassed look on his face. Maru can’t get over how _different_ he is.

“It’s fine.” She says blandly, confused why he would apologize for this. They’ve never, ever, spoken and that’s never been a problem in the past.

He starts to say something but whatever it is can’t seem to make it all the way up his vocal chords. He puts the plate in the dish rack and takes another. Is he uncomfortable with the silence? She wonders, not caring to break it.

“What were you reading?” He asks, politely. _Or is he actually interested?_

“Gravity’s Rainbow.”

“Oh. Kinda above my level.”

“I didn’t know you read at all.” Is that a rude thing to say?

He pauses a second in his drying before shrugging. His answer comes out composed, “there’s not much else to do around here.” As a somewhat calculated sounding afterthought, “since Haley left.”

“You must miss her.” Maru is starting to hate this conversation. Saying things she doesn’t mean, or doesn’t care about, just for the sake of social niceties makes her feel trapped, makes her insides feel like their itching to escape her body.

“She’s following her dream.” It doesn’t answer the question, but her mom comes back in the kitchen and saves Maru from having to talk more about it. She says bye to Alex and escapes to her room soon after.

* * *

He didn’t have the grades to make it to a school that could have propelled him on to go pro, and without his audience he lost his motivation. He told people from his high school days that it was because his grandpa was sick and his grandma needed his help. He signed up for a trades school he could commute to from Pelican Town.

His grandpa died before he could show anything for himself. Evelyn was devastated. The house, already quiet, was even more so. It rarely smelled like cookies anymore. Alex bumbled his way through college as the flowers in the town gardens wilted and died, without even noticing he was excelling.

He got offered a job in the same town as the school and started working right after graduation. The commute was a drag, but most things were. He didn’t have any close friends without gridball and without Haley. He only knew his grandma was struggling. The house began to feel oppressive without him understanding what that feeling was.

It was her idea to move into a seniors home.

“I’m not putting you in a home.” Alex said firmly.

“Well, it’s not your decision young man.” She chided, as he pulled a casserole Demetrius had supplied them with out of the oven. She’s sitting at the table, watching him.

“I don’t see why that’s better for you than being here.”

“Well, for one, I’ll be around people my own age. No offense to you but a woman sometimes needs more mature conversation.”

Alex frowned.

“And I don’t think you need some old lady holding you back from life.”

“You don’t hold me back.” He said forcefully, putting the casserole on the table a little too heavily, accidental emphasis.

She startles but doesn’t flinch from her point. “I think you hold yourself back and use me as an excuse.” She gave him a sad look.

“Grandma!”

“Well, it’s true. You’ve changed. Now I’m not saying for the worse, you’re a charming young man in my opinion… But Alex, dear, are you happy?”

Alex couldn’t answer, just slumped down at the table and sat there opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

She patted his hand. “I’ve picked it out already. They say I can come visit the room this week, would you be so kind as to drive me?”

She moved in to Seaside Gardens a month later. Alex visited her every week, sometimes twice.

The commuting got to be a lot. The town where he worked and the town where his grandma now lived were in opposite directions of Pelican town. He’d sometimes be on the road for seven hours in a single day.

The towns people noticed. Vibrant young jock turns sullen mechanic. It wasn’t until Robin’s truck broke down that anyone realized how adept Alex was.

“Wow, you got that fixed quickly.”

“It’s no trouble.”

Looking at the pile of tools permanently being bussed around in the back of Alex’s vehicle she started thinking.

“You know… Since Seb moved out we’ve got a lot of space in the garage.”

Alex continues putting his tools away, not sure where she’s going with this.

“It would be no trouble if you wanted to use that space.”

“Oh, it’s okay…”

“We know you’re on the road a lot.”

He shrugs, “part of the job, I guess.”

“What if you started working out of Pelican town?”

“What?”

“Set up a small shop in the garage.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s your space.”

“It’s a big house with only two people living in it now. We’d be happy to have someone around.”

He kept thinking about it but wasn’t going to bring it up on his own. It took Robin, Lewis, Evelyn and finally Demetrius to convince him to start his own business. He wouldn’t do it out of Robin’s garage though, he’d pay her to renovate his own house. It was nearly empty without George and Evelyn, taking up half the space was no issue to him. It was slow, without a lot of customers around. He still often had to commute to other towns to do jobs on site, just to pay the bills. But it was better.

Alex started eating dinner with Robin and Demetrius once a week. At first it was awkward, Alex had never been in their house before. Not past the front room anyway, when once he’d had to hire Robin for a renovation when their roof had started leaking, back when his grandpa was alive. Him and Seb had never been close, hostile if anything. He felt like he was intruding, moving in on someone else’s territory. But they were all lonely. Abandoned by family members who needed to move on, left in the past.

* * *

Something about Alex made Shane insecure. Or not just _something_ , saying that would imply it was a vague unnameable thing, and it was far from that. Alex was younger and handsome and incredibly fit. Alex was like Shane before he’d gone over the edge. Shane had told almost everyone in town to fuck off or something similar but he’d never said anything to Alex. Not because he wouldn’t have, or didn’t want to, but because Alex never gave him any occasion to.

When he was a teenager loitering around town with Haley, he’d been obnoxious and proud, and taken up more than his share of space. Shane could only vaguely remember that person, having only caught a glimpse here and there. Now he was older, he was withdrawn, quiet, melting into the background. Why then, did Shane notice him more than ever?

When Alex shows up Shane’s sitting on his porch, reading. He’s not much of a reader, ever, but for some reason he felt like he should be reading.

Alex nods at him wordlessly when he comes up the path. He’s carrying a panel over his shoulder and a power bank with his other hand. Both look heavy and awkward. Alex is sweating from the effort, his shirt clings to him in certain places. Shane finds that his hands are damp. Probably from the heat.

He lowers the book he hasn’t been reading. “You’re late.” He says stupidly.

“Sorry.” Is all Alex replies, setting down the bank and the panel. “I have to go get my tools.”

“There’s space to drive over.” Shane jerks his head towards his own truck, parked beside the apple tree Ry had planted before the cabin was ever built. In a few weeks, it would be producing its first fruit.

Alex nods, not making eye contact. “Guess I should have done that, then.”

“Yeah.”

Alex leaves to go get his tools and Shane waits there a second, holding his unread book loosely in his hand. It’s Elliott’s first novel, _The Song of the Sea._ Yoba, he thinks, I must look like such an ass reading this. He gets up and goes inside to put it away. He pours himself a glass of water, swishes some of it around in his dry mouth. Through the window he sees Alex drive his truck up and park it, watches as he gets out, removes his tools, gets ready to work. He takes another gulp.

“So how do you do this?”

Alex doesn’t suppress a look of mild shock. “You want to learn?”

“Uh, didn’t Ry- no, of course not.” He grits his teeth. Leave it to her to make him look like an over eager idiot. She probably called Alex _after_ he’d agreed to get power.

Alex reads the frustration off him and nods, says only “I can show you.”

He shows him how to secure the panel to his roof, how to hook up the wires and run them to the bank. He explains how it works. He installs an outlet in Shane’s cabin, and he’s glad he remembered to clean up inside that morning. He even remembers to offer him water.

Without something to do with his hands, other than hold his cup of water, Alex’s eyes go shifty. He doesn’t look at Shane, seems intent to look anywhere else. Shane wonders how much he hates him, if maybe he’s wrong about not ever saying shit to him, maybe he’d been too drunk to remember.

He gets nervous about it and his nerves make him sour, but before he can go any further on that particular trajectory of misery, Alex interrupts, “you going to the luau?”

Shane shrugs, “I might.”

Alex nods.

“You bringing Evelyn?” He knows the old lady moved out of town about a year ago, but Alex almost always brings her out to the festivals. It feels stupid to even ask.

Alex nods again, “yeah, she likes it.” He sets the empty glass down on his counter. “Maybe see you there,” he says quietly, almost nervously. Alex being nervous around him does something wonky to Shane’s insides.

“Yeah…” Shane says, trying to sort it out. “Probably not."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: alcohol, troubled past, annoying boys

The first weeks of summer pass and nothing happens. Maru develops a routine out of the nothingness. Wake up late, lie in bed staring at the ceiling until the need for food or coffee or to pee becomes unmanageable. Walk to the beach, or the forest, or more often than not, just the lake beside her house. Sit there. Read a little. Maybe stop in and say hi to Harvey. Skip lunch without noticing. Somehow find herself sitting in Seb’s old room. She tells herself this is because it’s _hot_ and the basement is cool. She tries to force herself to have dinner with her parents every night, but sometimes the hours slip past 6, 7, 8pm and she realizes she’s still down there, sitting in the dark.

Penny never follows up on her offer to go walking. Maru’s not sure if she’s upset.

“Maru?” Robin asks, and by the way she’s staring at her she knows she’s been zoning out again.

“Yes?” She asks, feeling the exertion to pull herself out of her own head to focus on her mother. They’re at the dinner table. Demetrius’s baked peach and pickled hops stew steaming in the dish between them.

“I was just asking if you’d be coming to the luau tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s tomorrow?”

She notices her mom and dad exchanging a glance before Demetrius tells her it is.

She shrugs, “yeah, I guess I’ll come.”

“I heard from Jodi that Sam’s coming up, it will be nice to see him again, won’t it?”

“Yeah, sure.” It’s the best she can offer. Why her mom thinks she’d give a shit about Sam visiting is beyond her. He never so much as looked at her back in the day when him and Sebastian were pals.

* * *

Her parents leave before her. When they ask through the bedroom door if she wants to walk down with them she says she’s doing her hair, then she’ll follow. Her mom sounds pleased that she’s making an effort. Never mind that in reality she was still in bed in her pajamas.

It takes her almost an hour to move.

She pulls her sundress on. A plain one. She opts not to put her bathing suit underneath, knowing she won’t swim.

The communal meal’s already been served when she gets there. Lewis is happily monopolizing the governor’s company. He seems pleased, the food must have been good this year. Someone must have been successful in convincing her dad _not_ to put in the ghost fish.

She just needs her parents to see that she’s here and then she thinks she’ll leave. She sees them preoccupied on the dance floor, Emily twirling by herself in circles around them. Sighing because she knows she’ll have to hang out for a while, she heads for the punch bowl.

Ry’s already there refilling. She’s looking at the bowl and Maru doesn’t think she knows she’s there until she holds out a glass. It isn’t until after she says “I think Pam spiked it, as usual, if that’s good with you” that she looks up at her. She looks right into her eyes and it takes Maru off guard for half a second before she reaches out to take the cup.

“It’s fine.”

Ry shrugs, getting herself a glass. “I don’t know if it is, last year Caroline and Jodi got so plastered they confronted Lewis about why he won’t go public with Marnie. Right in front of the governor.”

“Oh, dear.” Maru says before taking a sip.

Ry smiles at her softly and Maru feels like she has to be somewhere else. She doesn’t know why or where to go. Penny saves her the trouble of thinking.

“Hey Maru.” She smiles lopsidedly at her, it’s the most friendly she’s seemed since Maru’s gotten back. Her hair is falling loosely out of its bun, she’s wearing a dress that’s tighter and more low cut than Maru’s ever seen her in. She looks sexy, in some conventional kind of way, and Maru feels weird noticing it.

Penny sloppily gets herself a glass of punch, saying hi to Ry.

Interrupting Maru states “you’re having punch.”

Penny smiles sweetly at her but there’s defiance behind it, “yes, I am,” and “if you’ll excuse me,” and she turns and stumbles slightly through the sand towards where Sam and some guy Maru doesn’t know are standing.

“She seems to be having a good time.” Ry says, and Maru pries her eyes off Penny for a second to see that Ry’s noticing something weird too.

Maru puts her mostly full glass back down on the table, “I think I’ll go join them.”

* * *

Alex doesn’t love town festivals. Ever since Haley left he’s felt out of place at them, like an unwanted guest hovering at the edges. Even when people invite him in to their conversations or activities, it feels like a false nicety.

But he likes to bring his grandma to them. He knows she loves the tradition and a chance to catch up with her old friends in the valley. So he’s happy to see her happy. Tells himself that’s enough. But she’s more popular than him, and he still finds himself by the edges, alone.

Today Ry finds him. He wonders if she feels sorry for him or if it’s because she’s by the edges too. It’s hard for him to tell. She seems so easily friendly in a way he isn’t, but she’s never at the center of things. She’s not like Haley, who is happy to do the talking for him, and it makes him feel a bit awkward when she actually wants to listen to his opinion. But it’s not the worst. He feels like he’s almost having a normal conversation when she sees something coming towards them.

“You’re out for once.” Her words are cheeky but her smile isn’t and Alex sees what he didn’t notice. Shane waking towards them, his hands in his pockets and looking sheepish. Alex tries to ignore the flip flop of his stomach.

“Got bored.” He shrugs. Alex notices the sun is bringing out freckles across Shane’s nose. Had those been there when he’d installed the solar banks at his house the week before? He’d been too scared to look.

“Well, we’re glad. Right, Alex?” She nudges him and there’s nothing he can do but nod. She laughs playfully.

“So far you haven’t missed anything. Much less theatrical than last year.”

“I just came for Gus’ food.” Shane shuffles his feet, looking at the sand.

“Sure.” Ry says, and Alex can’t decipher her tone, Shane shoots her something like a warning look.

He shifts uncomfortably when there’s a moment of silence between the three of them.

“I should go check on my grandma.” He says it reflexively, without really thinking, without realizing he’s cutting Ry off from saying something. Why can’t he be normal and have a conversation? But it’s too late, so he leaves them to their own company.

Evelyn’s enjoying talking with Gus and Carolyn, hasn’t minded his absence for a second.

* * *

The guy she doesn’t know is Sam’s friend from the city, Connell. When she walked over and said hey she immediately regretted it. Sam and given her a slow up and down look and said something stupid like “almost didn’t recognize you, looking like a _girl_ , Maru.” She wished she’d worn her weather inappropriate overalls just to avoid the remark.

She’d wished she’d had something biting to say back. Penny was watching her, tipsy happiness clouding her eyes a little, but something like annoyance there too. Then Connell was introduced to her. He was stupid. The kind of guy that says “I was being _sarcastic_ ” when she doesn’t laugh at his jokes. Unable to comprehend that she realized that, he just wasn’t funny. Even though they have nothing to talk about and there’s no chemical energy between them, he keeps moving closer throughout the afternoon. Sam has his arm slung around Penny. Penny’s dress strap is falling down her arm and she does nothing to fix it, just keeps looking at Sam like he’s everything.

Penny’s getting drunk, and it startles Maru. She feels she can’t tell her to stop, but she wants to. She tries to find a moment when Sam or Connell aren’t around so she can say it privately, but they’re always there. She’s so focused on watching Sam and Penny that she doesn’t notice she’s getting drunk too. Connell’s been slipping her punch all night, and she’d absentmindedly been accepting.

* * *

Pam passes out in the sand right after the sun sets. Her mouth wide open, snoring. She’s off to the side, so it’s not an outrageous public display, but anyone who does see is a little caught off guard. And then caught off guard with being caught off guard. Pam’s always been a sloppy alcoholic, so _of course_ this is the kind of behaviour the towns people would expect from her, but why haven’t they seen it before?

Every year leading up to this Penny always shuffles her mother off before she fully passes out. It’s a fine balance she has learned to walk. Get her too early and she gets surly and mad at Penny for interfering with a perfectly fine evening, get her too late and the exact scene demonstrating itself now will occur. It’s been hard work for Penny to learn how to enjoy festivals when she knows this is how they’ll end. Hard work that never pays off because she _doesn’t_ enjoy them. Until tonight.

Alex has been Penny’s next door neighbour since he moved to Pelican town. They’re the only two people of their generation that never moved away. They’re both quiet readers, or at least have been for the past few years. Yet they’ve never formed a friendship, barely an acquaintanceship. It’s rare they ever say a word to each other, not even a hello.

But he notices her now. He sees Pam in the fading sun and knows he should go and help. Knows it would be physically easy for him to get her up and move her back to the trailer, right beside his own residence.

He remembers Penny and looks around for her, thinking _why isn’t she dealing with this?_

He sees her off to the side, with Sam and Maru, plus another stranger. She’s laughing, red in the face, sloppy. Alex never thinks about Penny, but he’s always unconsciously assumed that she’d be the same as him. Strict about sobriety after witnessing what alcohol can do. But he sees that she’s not, and it makes his gut churn.

“Alex honey, I think we should do something.” It’s Evelyn speaking, snapping him out of his emotions. She’s looking at Pam too.

“What can we do?” It comes out darker than he anticipated and he can tell from his grandma’s face that he’s exposed himself too much. “I’ll handle it.” He mutters, turning towards Pam and gritting his teeth. He doesn’t want to help her.

Before he can even take two steps he sees two people step in for him. They each lift her by and arms and lead her towards town. Ry and Shane. He catches Shane’s eye for the briefest of moments, sees the lucidity there, something like sadness too, and he feels something inexplicable swell inside him.

Him and his grandma leave shortly after and he has this fluttering hope that on their walk home he’ll run into Shane. He wants to thank him. He knows he has no reason to and that he won’t, but he desires it. He tries not to think about that too much when they get in without seeing him or Ry.

Instead he thinks about Penny and his reaction to seeing her. He wonders about why he never considers her, never lets her cross his mind. It starts to dawn on him that maybe it’s because she reminds him too much of his past. Maybe there are things he hasn’t fully come to terms with.

* * *

Maru sees Shane and Ry dragging Pam back to her trailer and notices that Penny doesn’t notice. She’s seen Penny carefully lead her drunk mother back home from festivals countless times. She even tried to convince her to forget about her a few times, not understanding why Penny didn’t just shake off the burden, how she couldn’t ever do that. Now, seeing that Penny _was_ doing that, she was concerned.

When Sam says he’s going to get them all another round of drinks and Connell goes to help, Maru finds her chance.

“What are you doing Penny?” She wants it to come out soft but it comes out accusatory. Full of reproach.

“Having fun, aren’t you?” Penny giggles. She’s drunk like a teen. Maru wonders if this is her first time being drunk, or if she’s gotten into a habit since she’s left. It scares her that she doesn’t know.

“No. I’m not.”

“ _You_ need to lighten up.” Penny shoves her shoulder lightly, playfully.

Maru shoves her back without thinking, a little less than playful, “ _you_ need to get a grip.” She wishes she wasn’t drunk. Why did she take those drinks from Connell?

“OH so you’re going to boss me around now? That’s the Maru I know. Yes, tell me what to do and how to be, please! I’d love some advice.” Penny’s voice drips in unnatural sarcasm.

“Stop it, Penny. Why are you being like this?”

“Like _what?_ Like a twenty-two year old?”

“It’s not like you.”

“Not like me? Not like me? You don’t even know me.”

“I know you better than those two!” Maru is near yelling now, motioning towards Connell and Sam who are making their way towards them across the beach. She lowers her voice to a hiss, “you’re not someone who gets drunk and fawns all over idiotic boys.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe that’s exactly the person I am and you just never noticed because you’re too busy thinking about equations or whatever else to notice the real people around you.”

“Penny…”

“Leave me alone, Maru. I didn’t ask for you to come back.” Penny turns and goes toward Sam. Maru sees her press herself into him and whispering in his ear before he, Connell and Penny all disappear to a dark place.

She’s standing there like a dumbstruck idiot – her plastic cup of boozed up punch slightly crushed in her clenched hand – when her parents walk past her, holding hands and smiling.

“Having a good time?” Her dad asks her, beaming. She knows they’ve seen her with Penny and the others.

“Yeah.” She responds numbly.

“We’re heading home, but don’t think you have to.” Her mom winks at her, smiling.

She forces a smile, “I think I’ll stay out for a bit.” She doesn’t want to be here anymore, never did, but can’t stand the idea of being stuck in her room. She leaves her happy parents and wonders down the beach, carefully skirting around the other villagers, not making eye contact, until she makes out to the second pier. She walks to the end and sits down, not knowing what else to do.

Her only relief is that Connell doesn’t come after her.

She sits there for a long while, the din of the luau slowly getting quieter. She knows at this point the governor has probably left and Lewis is getting drunk either to drown his sorrow or to celebrate. Marnie is sticking close to him. Pierre’s gone home, mumbling about the loss of a productive business day. Carolyn’s staying out with Jodi. Jas and Vincent, back in the day, would be pouting to go home now, but now that they were older they might have snuck off somewhere to do who knows what. Elliott and Leah had left long ago. Clint’s drunk crying over Emily to Willy, while she’s still dancing in a hallucinatory haze.

She wonders where Harvey is. Why didn’t she talk to him? Why did she stupidly try to guard Penny when she could have just been spending time with Harvey, the only good person in this town? Penny would do what she wanted, it didn’t matter what Maru said or did to influence her. And Penny was right, Maru didn’t know what she was like anymore. Maybe she was the kind of person who liked flirting with dumb boys and getting drunk on the beach with her friends. Was that really so wrong?

She’s broken out of her reverie by footsteps on the dock. She looks behind her to see Ry approaching. She holds up her hands, as if in surrender.

“Sorry, didn’t know you were out here. I’ll leave if you need a minute.” Maru’s not sure if she believes her. She turns back towards the water.

“It’s fine.” Though it’s not, and she wishes she would go. But Ry can’t read her mind and sits beside her anyway.

“Have an okay night?”

Maru gives a muffled laugh, but still says “yeah.”

“Are you lying?”

She turns to look at Ry in surprise. She knows her cover ups are always transparent, but nobody ever calls her out on it.

“No.” She says reflexively, turning back towards the sea with a frown. It’s transparent too.

This time Ry doesn’t question, just follows her gaze out across the dark ocean, “yeah, I guess it wasn’t so bad this year.”

“Get Pam home okay?” Maru asks, because she doesn’t know what else to say.

Ry frowns. “We did.” There’s a long silence before she adds, “get Penny home okay?”

Maru huffs, “no. No. She’s with Sam.” She pulls her legs up to her chest and wraps her arms around them.

“He seems like an alright guy…” Ry says it hesitantly, and if Maru wasn’t still drunk she might have noticed that it was a baited hook to get her to contradict.

But she doesn’t notice, and she falls for it. “He’s an idiot. He always has been.”

“His friend seemed to like you.”

“ _He_ is even worse,” failing to notice that Ry was paying attention to such things.

“Yeah?”

“The kind of guy who wishes he was like Sam.”

“Too weak to have his own personality?”

Maru can’t help but smile. “Something like that.”

“I know a few of those.”

“I guess you would, if you lived in Zuzu.” Maru grumbles, holding her knees closer.

“Didn’t love it there, then?”

Maru frowns, “no.”

“You were so excited before you left.” Ry muses, kicking her bare feet absently over the side of the dock.

Maru catches her breath, so Ry remembered her back in the day? She shakes the feeling that gives her, unable to interpret it. “I was excited for school. Not the city.”

“Too bad they’re inextricably linked, huh.” Ry’s making some kind of face that Maru can’t make out since she’s looking out to sea and not at her. She wonders what Ry’s experience with the city was like, but before it can hit her how weird it is to be wondering about someone else, Ry asks, “so you prefer it out here?”

Maru notices she’s been staring and turns away. “I don’t know.”

They sit without speaking for some time longer. Maru thinks she can feel the space between them and wonders what it would be like to close it. She feels the same sizzle of desire she always gets when she’s drunk and wants something to distract her from her life.

But she’s not going to act on it. Not here, not where she has no anonymity. She wants to sit there until the farmer leaves, like moving first would mean losing some kind of game.

Ry shows no inclination to leave, seems completely content to sit there in silence and stare out at the waves and the starry sky.

Eventually it dawns at Maru that if she tries to win this game it’ll be endless. She blurts out, “so Shane’s working for you now?” Her voice unnatural on the evening air.

Ry nods, “yep. Yeah, he is.”

“And that’s good?”

“It’s really good. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so well with someone.”

Maru knows she could say something about how that probably surprised a lot of the villagers, considering his past, etc., etc. But that’s not something that interests her, and she already feels stupid for starting this conversation she doesn’t want to have.

She’s silent for long enough to let Ry know the topic is dropped before she stands up. “I think I better go home.”

Ry looks up at her, “it’s getting late.”

“It must be for you.”

Ry laughs, getting up and following her off the dock. “Yep. Ten o’clock is pretty much the dead of night for a farmer.”

Maru laughs but she’s pretty sure it’s just the lingering alcohol in her system. They walk the rest of the way down the now empty beach in silence. When they get to the bridge, they both pause.

Ry looks her directly in the eye, there’s a ghost of an amused smile on the edge of her lip. “Come by the farm sometime.” She says it softly, almost like it’s an amusing request. All Maru can do is nod, and then Ry puts her hands in her pockets and turns to go, disappearing down the road towards the woods.

Maru’s not sure what’s just happened between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like Sam but for the purposes of this story he's kind of a dick. Sorry!


	5. Chapter 5

Maru will not go after Penny. She won’t. She can’t. Penny doesn’t want her to, and that’s fine by her. That’s that. She avoids the library. She avoids the town center. She avoids everywhere. She makes up an excuse every time her mom asks when they’re having Penny over for dinner.

 _Having to deal with Alex every week is enough,_ she thinks to herself. Despite his frequent appearances at her house nothing changes between them. He doesn’t contain anything she wants to know. She doesn’t understand why her parents entertain him, why he entertains them, but doesn’t waste energy thinking about it.

Although she has no interest in him she comes to prefer when he’s there. She won’t admit this on a conscious level, but when he’s there it provides her a relief. Her parents aren’t tiptoeing around her trying to assess if she’s _okay_ or even worse, what her plans are. Her dad’s been asking when she’s applying for med school.

“That was your plan, wasn’t it honey?” Her mom asks once after he brings it up. She just shrugs. After that, she thinks her mom tries to stop Demetrius pestering her, sensing something is off, but he just can’t help himself.

“You’ve got the grades for it. And the references. How many undergrads have been published in the magazines you have? There’s nothing holding you back.” He says between bites of savoury blueberry radish and red cabbage crisp.

“They say it’s good to wait a year between programs.” She recites for the umpteenth time. Her dad ignores it, her mother frowns.

“Blank spots on resumes aren’t good. Maybe an internship in the field? I could talk to someone from my old lab. Marine bio? There’s a station up the coast, perfect for you. Or would you prefer going to a stellar observatory? I don’t have direct connections, but you can get it if you try.” The options are endless, he keeps saying in different words, without knowing how much worse that makes her feel. How meaningless it is.

Once, to escape the house, she walks half way to the farm. She hovers on the path, midway between her home and Ry’s. What would happen if she went? Well, she’d have to talk. She’d have to act. She’s always been better as an observer.

She knows she doesn’t want to go. She knows the whole time she isn’t going to make it there. But she stands for so long between the two that she begins to doubt herself. Am I going to the farm? Do I want to talk to Ry?

The summer evening starts to creep up. A dark hue of shadows cast over the path, the amber light of the horizon getting obscured as the sun lowers itself behind the trees. She doesn’t go. She turns back. _It’s too late,_ she thinks.

* * *

Before the farmer ever got here there was another. Ry’s cousin, Finn. The true inheritor of the farm. It was passed down to him from their grandfather, though it lay dormant for years after the old man had passed away. When everyone had adjusted to the idea that the farm would be nothing but a weedy wasteland forever, Finn showed up at the bus stop with a parade of baggage. He was weedy himself, didn’t much look like he could hold his own body up for long, let alone manage an entire farm gone to seed.

There was scepticism from the villagers but it was overwhelmed by their general optimism. There seemed nowhere to go but up. So Pelican town showed its usual welcoming behaviour, albeit nosiness, assuming at the very least there would be some changes.

He didn’t fall for their bait of fresh baked goods, gardening tips or family recipes. The villagers shrugged it off; Leah and Elliott had been shy at first too, but they’d come around eventually. So the first spring passed and nobody was anywhere nearer in discovering anything about Finn or about any prospective plans for the farm.

It wasn’t until the second week of summer they were able to obtain any information other than his grocery list at Pierre’s, and it turned out not to be something to their liking at all.

Finn was a snob.

It didn’t come out until he got plastered beyond decency at the Stardrop one evening. Quickly belligerent, he let everyone know what he was thinking – that the real reason he didn’t speak to them wasn’t shyness, wasn’t introversion, was pure and simple superiority. He was a city boy and he didn’t want to be tarnished by bumbling country folk. Didn’t want rural habits polluting his carefully cultivated metropolitan mannerisms.

After the first instance they tried to write it off, shrugging their shoulders and mumbling something like “city folks, huh?” The second time they let themselves become irritated, and the third time Gus had to kick him out of the bar. Dislike for the new farmer spread like a virus.

The only glimmer of hope was that an up and going farm might aid the suffering local economy, but three days into autumn that hope came crashing down.

Marnie decided to take the path up from the forest to see if Finn was ready to expand into animal husbandry. Distaste for Finn had kept everyone, even Lewis, off the land, and nobody knew what progress had been made. Marnie was struck with finding it in exactly the same, if not more, disarray than it had been when vacant of a human occupant. Weeds and brambles sprawled, fences were left broken and rotting, old structures collapsed into shadowy splinters. One measly apple tree clung to life, fruitless. A single area had been cleared, not to support plant life, but for an outdoor lounge chair. What they’d mistaken for the healthy glow of working outside had only ever been vanity.

Marnie left without announcing herself. She was so let down she didn’t want to repeat what she’d seen, and Lewis had had to pry it out of her with a glass of Gus’ house red. Her father had been close friends with Finn’s grandfather, she could remember the farm flourishing and how sad it had been to see the hard work of years become eroded by neglect. This was a disgrace to the dead man’s memory.

When Finn left for good a week later, without a single goodbye, nobody was sad to see him go.

* * *

Maru was a kid when Shane showed up to live with Marnie, and she was gone through his tumultuous first grasps at sobriety, so it doesn’t faze her that he’s laughing.

Ry and Shane have just burst out of Pierre’s in a fit of amusement and for some inexplicable reason this seems to mean something to her mother. They’ve both walked to town together, her mom thinking it would be a great idea if _just the girls_ went for dinner at the Stardrop. It’s really because neither of them can take another weirdo meal prepared by Demetrius.

“So good to see that man so happy, isn’t it?” She says to Maru, who just shrugs. If her mother is disturbed by her lack of empathy, she says nothing.

Ry wipes tears from her eyes and then waves at them.

“You two seem well.” Robin calls, advancing towards them, Maru trails a little behind.

“Just laughing at Pierre and his good old attempts to rob us.”

“I guess he didn’t get away with it this time?” Robin gives a knowing smile. The farmers aren’t the only one who’ve fallen prey to Pierre’s tactics, but with Joja out of town he’s gotten a little power high, unwittingly sloppy.

“No, but he thinks he did.” Shane smirks. Robin quirks an eyebrow, interested.

“I’m gonna say hi to Harvey.” Maru excuses herself, not caring to hear the story. As she walks away she can feel Ry trying to catch her eye, but she refuses to meet the gaze.

The lights are off on the first floor so Maru thinks he might be out, but the door is unlocked. He’s doing paperwork in the dark when she walks in, the computer screen illuminating his face in eerie shadow.

“You really need some help.” She supplies, leaning over the counter.

He jumps, “oh yoba, Maru. Uh, we’re closed.”

“ _Oh_ so you only see me as a patient now?”

He frowns. “No, I don’t know why I said that, you startled me.” He looks thoughtful for a second, before returning to his heap of medical notes, “Yes. I need help.”

“Any chance you want to come to the Stardrop with my mom and I?” She’d like him there, as a barrier between the intimacy. Harvey’s awkwardness always ensured that.

“No, no, I mean sure, but I can’t. Too much to do.” He doesn’t even look at her, he’s so lost in his work.

“Make sure to remember to take care of yourself, _doctor._ ”

“Hm.” Is the only response he gives. Maru turns to go, wondering what Harvey’s life has really been like since she left. _Is it this? Every night?_

Her mom’s waiting for her outside when she emerges.

“Is the good doctor okay?” She says it with a playful hint. She’s always found Maru’s protectiveness over Harvey to be endearing. Somehow it’s funny to her that Maru can activate those feelings for someone so much older than herself. Maru doesn’t get why. She guesses it’s better than her thinking they’re in love, though.

Maru shrugs, because she really doesn’t know this time, not because she doesn’t want to answer. Her mother is getting used to the shrugs, only frowns at her for a bare second before changing the subject.

"I invited Shane and the farmer to come with us," Maru's stomach falls, "but Shane had to run and the farmer said she's meeting Willy for night fishing. Such a strange girl, I mean that as a compliment of course. Should we stop in on Alex?" 

"Why?" She says before she can stop herself. Her mother frowns again. 

"He's been through a lot, honey. I think he's lonely in that house by himself."

"Has he told you that?" Maru asks, irritated. Even if Alex was lonely, she really didn't see how hanging out with her middle aged parents would help with that. 

"No but... You get a sense for these things." 

_Or you project it,_ Maru thinks bitterly, unable to stop her mother from heading straight for Alex's door. She can feel herself clamming up more than she already was. As much as _girls night_ disturbs her, _girls night_ with Alex is unfathomably worse. She feels she only narrowly escaped a worse fate, having to sit through a meal with Shane _and_ the farmer, and now she has to amp herself up for yet another meal with tepid Alex?

But Alex doesn't answer. 

"Hm... must be visiting with Evelyn." Her mother says. 

"Or maybe he's hiding from us." Maru supplies, not wanting to be snarky, but she just can't seem to _stop._

"Oh you," her mother decides to take the comment in stride, ruffling Maru's hair. She wants to recoil from that gesture of familiarity. 

It's only when they're in the Stardrop that it occurs to her that perhaps her mother doesn't want to be alone with her. That _girls night_ is also disturbing to her.

* * *

On Thursdays Alex went to visit Evelyn. Sometimes he would sit in the residence with her, talking about their week and sharing tea. Sometimes they would take a tour of the garden, which Evelyn now volunteered to tend. She’d perked up since moving away from Pelican town and the constant reminders of George, rediscovered her love of growing things. Other times he took her to a public park nearby or to the community center that hosted activities for seniors. Her new friend Gladys had got her on to playing Majong. The ladies loved it when Alex joined in, though he usually opted to use the center’s gym instead.

The past few times he’d been in the gym a girl who looked a lot like Haley kept eyeing him. This week she asked him to spot her. He didn’t know how to say no.

She kept asking him to correct her which he could only shrug at and say she was doing it properly. He knew what she was trying to do and felt sick that this girl thought deferring to his judgement would attract him to her. It reminded him of when he’d seen Haley doing this with dumb hot guys when they were in high school. The worst part was when it worked.

“Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go pick up my grandma from majong.”

“Your grandma? That’s so sweet.”

“Yeah… um, bye.”

He left as quickly as he could so he wouldn’t have to think of some excuse not to give her his number.

Safe in the change room he took a long shower, feeling cheated of his work out. He got changed and slowly made his way to the room where he knew majong was, folded his arms and leaned against the wall. He was several minutes early and would have to wait.

He closed his eyes and let his mind go blank, let himself drift to nowhere. He’d been good at this ever since he was a kid.

He was jolted when he heard a gruff voice say, “Alex?”

He was so shocked to see Shane he didn’t say anything, didn’t even move.

Shane regarded his motionlessness, then studied the door he was waiting beside. “You thinking of joining senior women’s games club?”

“Um, my grandma. She’s in there.”

“So you shuttle her around like a good boy?” Shane smirked.

Alex couldn’t tell if he was trying to provoke him in jest or genuinely making fun of him.

“Why are you here?” It sounded accusatory. As if he was suspicious.

Shane frowned, “AA meeting.”

Alex wasn’t sure if he should apologize for asking or congratulate him with a “good for you buddy.” He was caught between the two when someone else called his name.

It was the girl from the gym.

“Oh. Hi.” He said meekly, wondering if he was going to call him out for clearly lying about having to leave so quickly.

“You still waiting for your grandma?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s so sweet of you, to spend time with her.”

Alex just shrugged. The painful awareness of Shane watching him glued his mouth shut. She could tell he was uncomfortable, she obviously was too, but she’d made up her mind.

“Anyway… I thought you might want to give me a call sometime.” She handed him a piece of paper with the name Bunny written in bubbly cursive, surrounding by little hearts and complete with a telephone number. “Maybe you can show me how to properly squat…”

Alex could feel himself burning up. He stared at the paper so he could avoid looking at Shane or her. He muttered something that sounded like yeah, and then she hurried away. He was so mortified he wished he could melt. Why didn’t he have the same swagger he’d had as a teenager? Back then he would have considered this as his due, would have accepted the situation with easy confidence.

“Seems like your type.”

Alex’s head snapped up to Shane’s face. He couldn’t read his expression. Was he making fun of him again?

Before he could muster a reply Shane started walking away, “see you around, nana’s boy.” The way he said it made it sound as if he never wanted to see him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to everyone who has shared encouragements so far :)


	6. Chapter 6

Shane was getting better at opening up during the meetings. At first he’d been shut like a clam, thinking it was highly beneath him and stupid and embarrassing to share his _feelings_ with a room full of other losers. But he kept showing up. He couldn’t do this alone. The past two years of hovering between on and off the wagon had been proof of that. Eventually respect for the others, and then the talking, came almost naturally.

Not this week. Not after seeing Alex. Not after seeing Alex take that girl's number.

Not because it meant anything, just because it was on his mind, taking up this big looming space and he just couldn't _focus._

She'd looked so much like Haley. Or what he can remember of Haley. Blond. Pretty. 

He'd never thought it before, but he now felt like he knew that Alex and Haley had been together, that hot blond chicks were his type. He'd thought before... he'd though before that Alex was like _him._ He felt too old to be making this kind of mistake. Not that he'd entertained any hopes of trying anything. Alex was too young, too... _Alex._ Too part of the community, too healthy, too normal. He did not let himself be reminded how on the day of the luau he'd almost skipped out but then remembering how Alex had asked him if he was, and maybe, maybe... did that mean he wanted to see him? And he'd gone, like an idiot, and they hadn't even spoken. He is _not_ thinking about that, hasn't thought about that at all, he'd never try anything with Alex. 

And how Alex had frozen up when he'd said he was going to an AA meeting. That was the real thing taking up space in his mind. He knew, like everyone knew, Alex's past prior to being with George and Evelyn. It made Shane want to shake himself. How close was he of a reminder of Alex's old man? Shane had been a grumpy asshole of a drunk, not a violent one, not a husband, not a father, but what if he had been? _He could have been._ He thinks about what Alex had to endure as a kid. 

He thinks about how close a reality is was for him to have been just like Alex's father. He feels the narrow miss, and he feels like he _was_ that person. 

“What’s gotten in to you?” Ry asked, after he’d slammed his truck door shut. It was dusk, he’d just gotten back from the meeting out of town. Ry was just getting back from night fishing, her catches strung over her shoulder. She was always working. She never seemed to stop.

“Nothing.” He said with way too much bite for it to be believable.

“Fucking yoba, Shane.”

He sucked air through his teeth, “it’s nothing.”

She rolled her eyes, “I won’t beat it out of you, but you’re oozing malcontent, buddy. Your energy is wilting the plants.”

He ignored her and went to his cabin without saying anything. He was careful not to slam the door behind him so Ry wouldn’t have another reason to call him a petulant child.

* * *

Harvey was used to being alone. 

Being alone was like a comfortable blanket for him. He'd had partners in the past, and that had felt good in a way, but he would always get dumped under the claim that his partner was lonely with him, that he was unreachable. He didn't get it. He didn't understand what they were trying to reach. He thought he was pretty much an open book, though he knew he was shy. He just wanted a simple life, that was all. That's why he moved to pelican town. 

And it had been simple. It was the distillation of simple.

All he did was work. Before Maru had left for school there had been long periods of the year where he was struggling to make ends meet. He thought he would be fine to take over her role, to do everything on his own. He _was_ fine. There just wasn’t much time for anything else.

Isn’t much time to take care of himself like he recommends to his patients, but that thought he always pushes to the back of his mind. There’s always another report to type up, another sample to test, another patient to prod.

He shoves his glasses up onto his forehead so he can wipe his eyes. They’re going bleary staring at the computer screen so long. It’s only then he realizes he’s been sitting in the dark for… how long?

He remembers then, Maru coming in… what had she said to him? Asked him to dinner? How long ago had that been?

He stands up and almost falls over because his leg has gone completely numb. When he’s finished hopping around to get the pins and needles out, he heads for the Stardrop.

He meets Maru and Robin just as their exiting the place. Maru frowns down at him, Robin asks, “making a house call, doctor?”

“What? No I…” It’s only then that he realizes he’s still wearing his lab coat.

He tries to laugh it off but it comes out more like a cough.

There’s a moment of awkwardness. He realizes he’s blocking their way down the step.

“Sorry, sorry.” He mumbles, stepping out of the way.

“Were you coming to see us?” Maru asks him.

“It seems I’ve rather lost track of time.” He mumbles, embarrassed. He’s starting to remember why he finds so much solace in working all the time, when he’s out of his office his permanent state of being seems to be _embarrassed._

“I’ll stay for a drink with you.” Maru offers, rather generously he thinks.

Robin seems slightly surprised, though perhaps pleased. Harvey can’t tell why.

“Oh yes, stay out as long as you like.” Maru scowls and Robin laughs, “not that I have to give you permission.”

Robin bids them goodnight and Maru turns back into the Stardrop. Harvey can’t remember the last time he’s been in here.

* * *

Alex was thirteen when Shane graduated high school, too young to be noticed. Moving in with his grandparents was a strange time filled with hope and sadness. He’d always loved visiting their house – his grandma’s cookies, the easy walk to the beach, the friendly neighbours, the quiet and the easy stability, routine – but he felt alone, unadjusted to his new life.

That first spring, out of school due to tragedy and grief, was painful, lonely and awkward. The summer got easier when Haley was around. She was mean to everyone but for some reason she was nice to him, seemed to get him without him having to say anything. They were eating ice cream by the river when he first saw him.

He was visiting Marnie with his family before moving off to college. He was wearing a letterman jacket - a clear athlete - easy smile, easy laugh, magnetic. Alex’s ice cream fell off the cone into the water without him even noticing. Haley shrieked with laughter so loudly Shane looked over. Alex burned scarlet and wanted to plunge into the current.

That was twelve years ago.

Ever since he’d get this thrill in the pit of his stomach whenever he’d see him. He wasn’t in town often and Alex found he was always hoping he would be, that he’d accidentally run into him. It would only ever happen when he’d finally forgotten him, causing him to turn red and run for it.

When Alex was fifteen and doing well on the gridball team, he thought he might have the confidence to ask him to toss the ball around with him if he ever showed up. He didn’t get the chance, Shane didn’t show up again for five years.

Alex didn’t forget about him but he stopped thinking about him, stopped wishing he’d show up. He stopped picturing him leading his college gridball team to glory. He felt an inexplicable surge of panic and excitement when he heard Jodi telling Caroline that Shane was moving in with Marnie.

He didn’t hear the whole conversation, had no idea when he was due to arrive. He found himself working out more frequently in the days that followed. He’d go jogging in the forest every morning, sometimes in the evening as well. He’d lift weights outside his house until he was covered in a sheen of sweat. He spent every afternoon shirtless on the beach, evening out his tan. He would shower religiously after any of these activities, spending forever and a lot of water on lathering his hair to silky smooth perfection.

Haley noticed.

“What’s gotten in to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re all… perfect.”

“I’m always perfect.”

She scoffed, “no, you usually smell like a gym bag. Now you smell like… is that peppermint?”

“Is it bad?”

She gave him a funny look, “are you in love or something?”

“No one’s good enough for me.”

“You’re blushing.”

“I don’t blush.”

“If I find out you’re in love with someone and didn’t tell me I’ll be mega pissed, you know.”

He changed the subject, and made a note to dial back on the peppermint during his next shower.

When Shane finally did show up, after what felt like an eternity but was only a week and a half, he returned to his usual shower routine, feeling stupid.

He’d gotten up extra early to jog, the sun barely visible over the horizon. He was just returning from the forest, about to pass Marnie’s, when he saw him. His heart leapt into his throat when he realized who it must be, he was too close to hide when he noticed the state of him.

The stench of alcohol was palpable. His sweater was almost disintegrating off of him, covered in stains. His hair was greasy, his eyes blood shot, with purple bags underneath so severe it almost looked like he’d been punched in the face. He was stumbling in the unfamiliar territory. He half jumped when he noticed Alex, though he’d been approaching in plain sight for some time.

“Don’t sneak up on a guy like that.” Shane muttered, heavily, as if using his voice was a weighted curse.

“Sorry,” Alex panted.

Instead of going home Alex ran to the beach. He stood on the dock and wondered about screaming, about flinging himself in. Instead he just sat down, hugging his knees, letting the cold wind hit him

* * *

Maru’s never gotten drinks with Harvey before. She’d been too young when she’d left for school, plus she wouldn’t have wanted to. She didn’t really understand the whole drinking thing until she’d been in the city a few years.

Now they’re sitting across from each other and each are nursing a glass of Gus’ red, on the house. She gets the impression that Gus and Emily are relieved to see Harvey out, though Harvey’s so bleary eyed and sunken into his own head he doesn’t notice anything.

They don’t speak for what feels like hours.

“Are you okay, Harvey?” She eventually ventures, feeling like he’s not even in the room.

“Huh?” He reacts like she’s startled him. “Oh. No. I mean, yes.”

“Great.” She scoffs.

“No, I’m fine.” Compulsively he takes off his glasses and starts cleaning them. It’s a habit of his, and Maru’s convinced he does it so he doesn’t have to see the person confronting him. He sighs. “Long days at work. Lately. Even though it’s summer… Even though the valley is shrinking.” He puts his glasses back on and frowns at her.

“It’s a lot.” She states.

“Yes.” He muses, but something in him seems to wake up a little. “But what about you?”

She shrugs, “same old.”

He stares at her and it’s uncomfortable because it seems like he’s actually looking, trying to find something.

“You’re not.” He says plainly.

“What?” She nearly splutters after swallowing wine.

“The same old. You’re different.” He states in a matter of fact sort of way.

“Okay, and?” She says, more irritated sounding than she intends.

“And nothing.” He says, again plainly. She remembers she’s talking to Harvey, that Harvey doesn’t weigh his questions and statements like her parents do, that he’s an observer like she is.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to get defensive I’m just… I don’t know. It’s hard being back.” She apologizes, wishing she could speak to people like she used to, without care, without feeling the heaviness of it.

“Why did you come back?” He asks her over a sip of his wine.

She hates this question, but it’s _Harvey._

“I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t stay in the city.” She says honestly but still with a dismissive tone, downplaying.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Surely, not _nothing._ ” He says, bordering on amused. She knows he’s right, that she should be beyond those high school responses. _It was four years, after all._

“Not nothing, but not something either.”

He just nods, like he understands, but Maru doesn’t know how he could because she doesn’t understand.

They fall into another silence, but this time it feels less like Harvey is lost and more like he’s thinking. After a time he says, “do you want your old job back?”

“Do you need me to do it?”

“No. I can find someone else. Just…” He looks around the bar, “I can’t remember the last time I was here.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He nods and takes another sip of wine.

They end up getting kind of drunk, and they end up laughing, and they end up having a pretty good time. They even include Emily in a shockingly non-awkward conversation when she comes around to refill their drinks.

Right, Maru thinks when she’s walking home in the warm night, having friends is fun, isn’t it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some day, this fic will be less melancholy than it is now.


	7. Chapter 7

She didn’t hear him coming down the steps. She didn’t hear him open the door either.

“What are you doing in my room?” It wasn’t accusatory as it once might have been. It was simply a question.

She lifted her head up slightly from her position of lounging on the bed, then lowered herself back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s not your room anymore. You moved out.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t stick.” Sebastian throws down his bag and then walks to his desk chair and slumps into it. He swivels so he’s facing her. “Why are you hiding down here?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Just snooping through my old comic book collection, then?”

She sighs and sits up, “I did that pretty thoroughly back in grade seven. I think I read them all before you did.”

He raises an eyebrow, “probably.”

There’s a moment of silence. She crosses her legs.

“So why are you back then?”

He exhales, rubs the back of his head. “City wasn’t so good.”

She nods, “no. It wasn’t.”

They hadn’t been in the same city, but that didn’t seem to matter just then. They don’t say anything else for a while. Then Maru gets up and walks towards the door.

“I guess you can have your room back.”

He looks at her over the top of his computer and nods before she goes, closing the door behind her. It’s the most civil conversation they’ve had in years.

* * *

Back when Finn was still in town, dislike for him had been a rampant topic in Pelican town for a number of weeks, and it was felt deeply and personally, though none had such claim to personal offense as Shane.

Shane had been there when Finn had first sauntered into the Stardrop and quietly folded himself onto a stool at the bar and ordered a ginger and rye from Emily. He’d been within earshot when Emily, normally friendly and talkative with everyone, and gone aloof and started to avoid him.

He was there the second night it happened too. He cut himself off early because that fuck was so annoying. He hadn’t anticipated being followed.

“I saw you watching me all night.”

He heard the words slurred from behind him. When he turned and saw Finn stumbling towards him in the dark, quiet, street, he didn’t know how to react, what to expect.

“And I saw you the other night too.”

“That’s what happens when you’re a belligerent ass.” Shane snapped back, wondering if his scrawny kid had some sort of machismo complex and wanted to fight him.

“Sure, sure…” Snickered Finn, stumbling even closer, entering Shane’s personal space. “Not because you see something you want, country boy?”

And then, through the random chaos that is the universe, Finn’s lips were against his, his tongue on his teeth.

Shane was drunk. He went along with it. Like he’d go along with it every night afterwards, listening to Finn’s derogatory terms of endearment; country boy, dumb hick, hillbilly fag.

Shane would wake up in the morning with a pounding headache and a stomach full of livid anger. Live anger. By the same freak energy that brought them together, after months of emotional atrophy, Shane began to feel again.

* * *

Maru stands at the top of the dark staircase and thinks about what she’s about to do.

Back in the day it would have been out of the question.

She internally shrugs, they aren’t back in the day, are they? And walks down the steps.

She knocks on the door. “It’s me.”

“It’s open.”

She goes in.

“You want to come to the moonlight jellies with me?”

“What?” There’s no lights on, just the computer screen glow illuminating his face is harsh shadows.

“You want to go to the moonlight jellies with me?” She repeats, feeling dumb.

He shrugs, “yeah, sure.” His eyes lower back to his screen, “just give me a minute to finish this up.”

* * *

Alex stood on the pier alone, leaning out slightly towards the water, searching for something in the gloom.

Shane stood with Ry at the other end of the pier. She was talking to Harvey, and Shane was tuning them out completely. He was looking for Evelyn now, sure to be near her grandson, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. He did another sweep over the spectators, looking to see that girl from the gym, only noticing his clenched chest when he released after being unable to locate her. _Why is he even looking, what kind of self-torture is this?_

A elbow sticks into his ribs and causes him to take a step dangerously close to the edge of the pier.

“Fuck off.” He hisses, reactionary. Ry’s looking at him with an unamused expression, Harvey’s gone, down the way talking to Maru and Sebastian.

“Just go say hi.”

“To who? Harvey?”

“No, Lewis. You know who, asshole. Just go, he’s alone.”

He glares at her, remaining firmly planted where he is. She rolls her eyes and leaves him there. Now it’s his turn to pretend to stare out at the water. To anyone watching, the look on his face would give the impression that he hated it.

* * *

It was weird being with Sebastian like this. She remembers them getting along well when they were kids, him protecting her from the bullies at school, but as they got older things got more hostile. Maru didn’t understand why. Sebastian was cloaked in his own darkness and she couldn’t penetrate it, wasn’t welcome to try.

They’d only seen each other a few times since she’d moved and the hostility he usually exhibited towards her changed to an outright exhaustion. A heavy silence. It was as if he no longer had the energy to fight whatever it was about her that irked him.

Now standing by the water together, she wondered what it was between them. They spoke little on the walk down, hadn’t exchanged many words at all since his arrival back home a few days ago. But something had definitely changed. They now pointedly stood away from their parents, not wanting any remarks on an alteration neither of them yet understood.

She was snapped out of thinking about it by Harvey, approaching in his usual awkward manner.

“Maru,” he nods at her and she returns it. “Nice to see you again.” He says to Sebastian.

Sebastian just nods, and they all stand there in their individual silences, staring out at the water.

“Hey Seb, I didn’t know you were back!” Maru is surprised to see Ry walking towards them. She’s even more surprised when she hugs her brother, and he hugs her back without any resistance. Since when were they friends? Since when did Seb show physical affection?

“Just got back the other day.” He says, patting her on the back. “I thought about coming by…” They back away from each other and Sebastian shrugs.

“No need to explain, pal. But it’s nice to see you.”

He smiles at her, “you too. Is Eternal Darkness still kicking?”

“Eternal Darkness?” Harvey asks, raising an eyebrow.

Ry laughs, “ Seb’s void chicken. We call her ED for short, and yeah, she’s good. She _hates_ Shane, chased him out of the coop the other day.”

“That’s my girl.” Seb smiles, clearly amused. Maru doesn’t know what to make of it, but before she can observe any more of their familiar dynamic Lewis calls Ry over to help launch the boat to lure the Jellies.

“Since when are you friends?” She can’t help but ask.

Seb shrugs, “I don’t know. Since after you left for school.” He clearly doesn’t think it’s as strange as she does.

It isn’t long before the ethereal glow of jellies starts bobbing towards them, and they all lean in to get a better look. It’s still amazing to each of them, even after all these years.

She’s not exactly sure _how_ Harvey manages to fall in the water, but he does.

* * *

Shane’s down the way when he sees Harvey accidentally go for a dip with the jellies. He takes a few steps forward, instinctively, but Elliott, standing nearer, is already in the water before he can form any real thoughts.

His eyes only linger on the rescue scene for a second – Maru and Sebastian helping to pull the two men back to dryness, Harvey shocked and coughing, Elliott holding onto to him firmly – before they travel up the crowd again. He sees Alex, on the other side of the commotion. His eyes aren’t on the rescue scene either, they’re on _him._ The realization sends a shudder through him. Alex looks away again quickly, and it’s too dark to see if his ears went red. 

Shane stares out at the water again, thinking, calculating.

* * *

Harvey is not a good swimmer but he is adept at embarrassing himself.

He’s not sure how he ended up in the water, all he knows is that he did. One second he’s dry, standing beside Maru, observing a beautiful natural phenomena, the next he’s got water up his nose and doesn’t know which way the surface is in the black murk of the cold night sea. A third second and big warm hands are gripping him and pulling him to safety. A fourth, and he’s back on the dock, coughing his apologies.

He sees Maru’s concerned face and Sebastian’s slightly amused face and a swirl of other people’s too. He hears a melodic voice say “it’s alright,” quietly in his ear, and then he hears that same sentence repeated louder for the blurry faces. He’s swept off the dock and up the shore in another blink of an eye.

He’s trembling from cold and dripping water droplets all over Elliott’s floor. _How did he get here?_

“E-e-Elliott?” He stammers through his clacking teeth, trying to find a thread of sense in it all.

Elliott’s lighting candles in the dark shack. Then he’s pulling off his overcoat and hanging it over his desk chair. “Let’s get some dry clothes, shall we?” His voice doesn’t waver like Harvey’s but in the soft light he can see that he’s also shivering a little. This makes him feel more calm. Noticing Elliott’s white blouse stick to his firm chest, transparent in its wetness, makes him feel considerably less calm.

Instead of retrieving the promised dry clothes he gets a towel. He hands it to Harvey, who’s slow to remove his arms from holding himself. “Th-thanks,” he manages.

Elliott smiles softly, “here,” he says, before tugging at Harvey’s wet coat and removing it. Is it the increased exposure to the air or his touch that makes him tremble more? Elliott wraps the towel around his shoulders. He’s instantly warmer.

“I’m sorry, Elliott.” Harvey mumbles.

“Don’t be absurd. Unless you intended to fall in the water..?” Elliott raises an eyebrow at him. He hasn’t stepped back since wrapping the towel at him, and Harvey, slightly taller, looks down into his eyes and can’t find it in himself to answer the question.

Elliott seems to find this amusing and steps away from him, going to retrieve the promised clothing.

* * *

As Elliott steals Harvey away up the beach Maru spots Penny sneaking away quietly on her own. It’s the first time she’s seen her since the luau. She has no idea what happened between her, Sam and Connell, but she knows that Sam and his friend had left the next day. She hopes that means he didn’t have time to inflict too much damage.

Penny seems more herself, shrivelling up in the shadows, but that’s not exactly a comfort.

“You and Penny aren’t really talking, are you?” Sebastian asked.

“Since when are you so observant?” She replies in a deadpan voice.

Seb rolls his eyes, “she used to be at our house for dinner every other night. I haven’t seen her at all since I got back.”

“We aren’t… honestly, I don’t know.”

He shrugs, refocuses on the water like the conversation is dropped.

She’s not sure why she has the impulse to say, “Sam was here. For the luau.”

She sees him freeze under that statement, his face growing a shade paler than it already is, but he recovers himself quickly, just nods. She wonders what that meant to him.

* * *

The initial wonder of the jellies is starting to wear off and people are returning to their conversations, though still content to stand out in the glow. Ry never returns to Shane’s side and he wonders if she’s pointedly ignoring him. He’s not going to be the one to seek her out.

After he’s finished glaring at her and the people she’s talking to, he turns back to the water and is startled, thrilled and disturbed to notice Alex is now standing next to him.

“So did you teach that girl how to properly squat?” It’s a horrible intro, he wishes he’d said anything else, he wishes hadn’t said anything.

Alex’s ears go red, “uh, no… no.” His eyes are pointedly fixed on the water.

“Not your type after all?”

Alex looks over at him, and he’s biting his lip and shaking his head no. Shane can’t stand to look at that for too long and has to face the sea again.

“So uh… is your power still on?” Alex asks, shifting his weight awkwardly.

“You know it is.” Shane says with his classic bite, though this time it makes him want to wince.

Alex eyebrows crinkle in confusion.

Shane shrugs, “you did good work.”

“Oh.” Alex rubs the back of his head self-consciously, Shane enjoys the look of his mussed up hair. _No, he doesn’t, he didn’t even see that._

“Don’t act like you don’t know you’re good.” Shane scoffs.

“I don’t think about it in that way.” Alex says with a thoughtful frown. Shane wants to study that frown.

“Oh.” Is all Shane can think to say. He’s surprised by the answer. Because it’s a weird answer or because it’s Alex saying it?

They stand there. In silence. And it’s horrible. The chatter of the crowd around them serving as an incessant reminder to Shane of his lack of conversational ability. He can’t think of a single thing to say.

“I’m sorry about the other day.” Alex says, suddenly.

“What?” Shane’s caught off guard again. What could _he_ possibly be sorry for?

“I feel like I was rude. I wasn’t expecting to see you there and my brain just sort of… wasn’t working.”

“Look Alex,” _the feel of that name in his mouth, he shouldn’t even be saying it,_ “I’ve kind of got the market cornered on being rude, don’t think you can disrupt that.” This is probably where Shane should apologize too, but he doesn’t.

“I don’t know about-”

“It’s true.” Shane cuts him off, if only to make his point.

There’s another silence. Shane has to fight hard to think of something to fill it with.

“So… Is Evelyn not here tonight?” _That’s all he can come up with?_

Alex shakes his head, “she said it’s too late for her.”

Shane nods, aware now, that he’s exhausted all possible paths of conversation. He takes a step back from the edge of the dock.

“I uh… think I’m gonna head. Early farmer morning and all.”

To his surprise, delight, horror, “yeah, me too. But the mechanic’s version.”

They walk back to town together, the sleeve of Alex’s shirt occasionally brushing against Shane’s arm.

* * *

“I keep asking your sister to visit the farm but she never shows up.” Ry is telling Sebastian, grin flickering between him and Maru.

“Oh?” Sebastian raises an eyebrow, barely visible through his hair, gaze turned to inspect Maru’s reaction to this.

“I’ve been uh… I wasn’t sure you meant it.” She thinks that’s a better lie than saying she’s been busy. By the look Sebastian is giving her she can tell he thinks it’s a weird response coming from her.

Ry just shakes her head, “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

“Okay well…”

“We’ll stop by this week,” Sebastian finishes for her, nonchalantly, like that’s a totally normal thing for the two of them to do.

We will? She wants to say, but doesn’t, not sure if she’s mad at him or not for speaking for her. The three of them have been out on the docks longer than she would have expected, many people having already left.

Ry smiles, “better,” and she nudges him lightly. The familiarity between them is still throwing Maru for a loop. Ry looks over her shoulder, “did you see if Shane left?”

“I think I saw him leave with Alex.” Seb says disinterestedly.

Ry’s head snaps back to look at her brother, eyebrows up high.

Sebastian chuckles, “does that mean something?”

“I don’t know… I do not know.” She muses.

It seems like Sebastian is about to ask further questions about this but he's interrupted by Robin and Demetrius. 

"Children. Ry." Demetrius greets, smiling jovially at them. 

"Enjoying yourselves? Behaving yourselves?" Robin adds. 

"Enjoying yes, who can be the judge of behaving?" Ry jokes to Robin. Her parents laugh and Sebastian rolls his eyes. 

"Glad you're having fun. We're heading home now but don't think you have-"

Maru cuts off her mother's usual plea for her children to have a social life, "I'll come with."

"Think I'll stay for a bit." Sebastian says, surprising apparently everyone except himself and Ry. Maru, Demetrius and Robin all swallow their disbelief and bid them goodnight. Without Abigail and Sam, oftentimes even with them, Sebastian was usually the first to slink off at the first excuse.

"He seems to be doing well, Robin." Maru's dad says when they're halfway up the beach, patting her hand. 

"I hope you're right." Robin says quietly. 

Maru's not sure if she agrees but doesn't voice this opinion. Her brother was always a mystery to her. Crossing into town she realizes that she feels very strange about her brother and Ry hanging out without her. What could they possibly be talking about? She almost turns back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra thanks to everyone who's been encouraging the creation of this story <3 following updates might be a little slower than they have been, but they will come.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:   
> bad words!  
> mild (consensual) sexual violence  
> alcoholism   
> a wee bit 'o misery

“Yoba Maru, since when am _I_ the one trying to convince _you_ to socialize?”

She doesn’t answer so he goes on.

“It’s not even a social event, for fuck’s sake. It’s a farm. It’s inanimate plants.” He’s standing in the door to her room and she’s lying back in her bed with a book she hasn’t been reading in her lap.

“Plants aren’t inanimate, they’re actually much more complex than you would guess. They have social lives, they can _smell_ and _taste_ and _learn_ , we don’t even know how-” She starts to explain, to deflect.

“Well there she is.” Seb rolls his eyes, but he’s got the hint of a smile on his lips. With anyone else she’d regret falling into her old pattern of geeking out, not wanting to give them false hope that she was _back_ or whatever else they were thinking, but with Seb it felt safe. It’s not like she could disappoint him.

“Seb, I… I just don’t feel like.. I can.” It comes out way more honest than she anticipated, she wants to swallow it back as soon as it leaves her lips.

“I get it.” And he does. Seb was right about how strange it was for him to be the one pushing her to go out. It used to be her sent down to the basement to drag him up for an family event, town festival, dinner. Back then he’d been snarky towards her at best, sometimes vile and cruel, but the worst was when he would just lie there.

His despondency back then had unsettled her.

He sighs and she’s not sure if he’d giving up or processing a new plan of attack.

“Look Maru, take it from someone who knows… sitting around inside isn’t going to change anything.”

Before she can ask for specifics he leaves. Leaves her thinking _what the hell is that supposed to mean?_

* * *

It took two years for the sobriety to stick.

He tried to do it on his own.

Shane had a lot of bad feelings about himself, was chalk full of self-pity, but when Finn started calling him all sorts of names he couldn’t reconcile the image.

He was useless, lazy, a suck on society. His life amounted to nothing, he was a disappointment because he was drunk all the time, he was drunk all the time because he was a disappointment. An idiotic cycle of comfortable self-loathing.

When Finn called him a dumb hick or a hillbilly fag it didn’t exactly align with this representation of himself. He had lived most of his life in the city. Finn was clearly stupider than him. In fact, Shane thought he was probably smarter than most people but there was just something detrimentally wrong with him that made him incapable of reaching success.

_sheep fucker_

_inbred bumpkin_

He kept fucking Finn out of self-loathing. _This is as good as you can do, this lousy stupid asshole is as good as you can do._ It made him feel sick. It made him furious. He couldn’t see the line between if it was himself or Finn making him feel this way.

One day, working at Joja, he got so mad about it he went to Finn’s directly after work. He’d been inside, binge watching some show, when Shane had barged in. He barely gave him time to leap up in surprise before he shoved him face down over the side of the couch.

“You think you’re too good for my cock, city boy?” He pressed himself against him.

“I am, you filthy farmer.” Finn might have lived on a farm, and everyone in town might have considered him a farmer, but he never considered himself one.

Shane reached around and grabbed his erection, “then why are you hard for me?”

Finn gasped, pushing back against him, “I need you,” he groaned.

Shane wasn’t expecting this.

“I need you.” He repeated, desperately.

Shane didn’t understand why this felt so different than any other time. It suddenly dawned on him that he was sober. He fucked him hard, loving the effect he’d never fully noticed he’d had over the other man.

Afterwards he got a real screwy notion that Finn could help him.

* * *

Ry and Sebastian’s friendship had been accidental. Like Maru, he’d originally read her as being optimistic, too outgoing to be someone he’d gravitate towards (though if you consider his relationship with Sam you’d realize that wasn’t true, but he doesn’t consider his relationship with Sam).

She’d caught him smoking weed by the lake. He can’t really remember who started talking, or about what, but it ended with her giving him a jar of pumpkin soup. It hadn’t been intended for him - she was trading recipes with Linus and he was getting the leftovers - but that didn’t matter. He’d slopped it down right there, in the cold, and he’d almost cried because of how good it had been (he was high, ok).

After that they were on chill terms, never really hanging out, but never upset to see each other. It wasn’t until after Abigail and Sam left that they really became friends, when Sebastian was feeling particularly dark. She was easy to be around. Didn’t pressure him. He liked that, didn’t realize how badly he needed it.

Shane hadn’t been working on the farm back then. It had been just Ry on the sprawling property, grappling with the immensity of it, the smallness that was her individual self. Sebastian had been on that land many times when it was abandoned. With Sam and Abigail, smoking weed, drinking, being dumb kids. It changed when Ry became the farmer - and not only in the new building editions, the plants she had planted – there was something in the air. Something about Ry, something about the nature of that place, were meant for each other.

With Shane living there now everything seemed intensified. More intensely green, more intensely sprawling, jungle-like, lush. Somehow it seemed simultaneously less regulated and more so. Maybe self-regulated. A strong, resilient, biological system.

They were creating a diverse eco-system that was nothing like any farm Sebastian had ever imagined. Walking one to the property the first time since he’d returned put words in his head like _sanctuary_. First arriving, he just had to stand there in awe for several minutes.

“Seb!” Ry had called, noticing him from up in a tree. She was harvesting apples, barefoot, more graceful in precarious positions in branches than she was on the ground. She jumped down, removing her picking bucket and coming over to hug him.

“This is fucking insane.”

“It makes me feel just the opposite, actually.” She’d replied, trying and failing to supress her beaming smile at his awe.

The rest of the day she’d given him a tour of the grounds, and he’d helped her pick fruit, and then they’d made soup. Shane flitted in and out, clearly wary of Sebastian’s presence, but making snarky jokes with Ry. They were strangely good together, something Sebastian never would have guessed.

“Uh… Are you and he?” He’d asked, after Shane had dropped off some goat cheese from his latest batch. He’d heard his mom speculating about them earlier that week, and at first had dismissed as absolutely whack, but now…

“I think you know the answer.” She said flatly, not looking up from the onions she’s dicing, no hint of a tear in her eye.

“Sorry, just that… you seem good together.” He gives her a smug but slightly sheepish look.

“We are. Platonically.”

He nods in understanding.

“So, you ready to talk about why you’re back?” She asks, after a few minutes of quiet working.

He sighs, “I don’t think so.”

She nods, understanding without him having to elaborate. Or else, if she doesn’t understand, she knows she doesn’t need to.

* * *

He made a game out of being sober. If he could get Finn to profess his need of him three times in a night he wouldn’t drink. Of course there were exceptions.

If Finn offered him a drink he’d obviously have to take it. He didn’t tell him he was trying to go sober, because for one he figured he would fail, for two he figured Finn would laugh at him and for three he didn’t want to recognize that he actually needed to go sober in the first place.

Sometimes he would also convince himself the rules were the other way around, that if he got Finn to profess his desperate need three times, he deserved a drink.

In the end he was drinking the same amount but sustained an illusion of control he hadn’t had before. He also kept Finn out of the Stardrop and away from the other villagers by always keeping the nights secluded to the farm, which he figured he deserved to be commended for.

After a couple weeks of this people started to notice his absence at the saloon. First it was Marnie, asking him where he was getting off to at nights. She asked with wary hope, like she knew the answer still involved a lot of drinking but was allowing herself the optimism that maybe it didn’t.

He had shrugged, irritated by her watchfulness, “nowhere really.”

* * *

Sebastian’s return didn’t break Maru’s habit of visiting the basement. She would often go down there still, just to hang out silently. They would watch a movie, or play some two person game that didn’t involve talking. It was peaceful and easy. Robin was pleased about it, Demetrius on edge.

She hadn’t been down since Sebastian had said what he’d said the other day. It had bothered her. She wanted a deeper explanation and to forget it at the same time.

_Sitting around inside isn’t going to change anything._

But she wasn’t trying to change anything. She hadn’t said she wanted a change. Maybe he was just reading into her lack of desire to socialize and perform botany experiments, projecting onto her something that had more to do with him.

She decides to push it out of her mind.

She decide to visit him in his room again, thinking there’s no danger in watching some old sci-fi movie.

She is not expecting anyone else to be down there.

She is definitely not expecting it to be Ry.

“Hey Maru!” She says, from inside the sunken confines of her brother’s old beanbag chair. She looks strangely gangly sitting there, out of place.

“I didn’t know you were here.” She states emotionlessly yet it still comes out sounding like she’s been caught.

“She was just returning my copy of Borne.” Seb says, going through a stack of slim books in his hand, organizing them carefully.

“Fellow sci-fi geek.” Ry grins sheepishly.

“Oh.” Maru isn’t expecting that from her. She stands there dumbly for a minute, halfway through the doorway, not sure what to do.

“You coming in or?” Sebastian gives her a sceptical look.

She decides she has to, considering she’s just barged in, it would be too awkward to leave now.

“So what have you been up to?” Ry asks politely, innocently unaware of how much Maru doesn’t want to account for herself.

She feels she can’t get away with her usual shrug with Ry, so starts bumbling through a list, “uh, reading a lot, enjoying being outside…” _That’s her whole list?_ Feeling lame she finds herself lying without thinking, “I’m going back to work for Harvey.”

“You are?” Sebastian says dubiously. _Why the fuck did she say that?_

“Yeah.” She shuffles her feet. She _had_ been thinking of it, after all, just not in a… real, actually-going-to-happen kind of way.

“Does he know that?” He says, once again, disbelieving.

_Shut the fuck up, asshole_ she wants to hiss at him.

“Yes.” Glowering, hoping her face expresses what she really means. Now she’s going to have to tell Harvey to give her the job back. At least the offer was already on the table. That made it less pathetic.

“Damn, he must be glad.” Ry muses, “he always speaks super highly of you, Maru.”

Maru doesn’t know what to do with the praise. She runs a hand through her tangled hair, “yeah well… we’re friends.” For lack of anything else to do she sits on the floor opposite Ry, hugging her knees up to her chest.

Sebastian’s still organizing his bookshelf, seems to be in the midst of unpacking a box he must have brought with him from the city. _Is this what the two of them do? Just sit here in silence?_

“So uh… how’s the farm?”

“Good. Pomegranates will be fruiting soon, for the first time. Pretty stoked about that, and so is Elliott.” She laughs at his last part, Maru’s not in on why. But she’s grateful she doesn’t invite her over again.

Maru just nods, not sure where else she can take this conversation without getting into nit-picky botanical details she doesn’t have the patience to explain.

From the top of the stairs she hears her mom yell, “hey Seb! There’s someone here who wants you to sign for a package.”

“Oh damn, that’s probably my new monitor, I’ll be right back.”

And now Maru’s alone with Ry. For the first time since the luau. She’d pushed that night out of her memory, and now it’s fuzzy, and she remembers being drunk and… and what? Nothing. She feels her face heat up but she can’t for the life of her figure out why.

“You glad to have Seb back?” Ry asks casually, picking at a thread in her jeans.

It takes her a second to come out of her head and realize she has to answer. “Oh? Yeah… I mean, we were never really friends.” _And what relevance does that have to Ry?_ she thinks, annoyed at herself.

Ry raises an eyebrow, “seems like you are now.”

“I guess.”

“Kinda weird how things change, huh?”

They hear laughter from upstairs. Sebastian and Robin? Maru can’t remember the last time she’s heard them joke around. It used to be normal, but not since she was very, very young.

Ry’s noticing it too. “He seems good.”

“I think he is.” She doesn’t realize it until she says it, and then it makes her grimace. All she’s done is think about how weird it was that he was being more outgoing than her, how he wasn’t being mean, never phrasing it as him being _good,_ him being _better_. Why hadn’t she taken that in?

Some of this must show on her face, because she realizes Ry’s studying her expression. Something about being under that gaze makes her feel exposed, cracked open like she can’t hide. Like Ry’s seeing something she herself doesn’t have access to. It makes her want to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so basically I feel like we get a lot of stories about Sebastian’s personal development, and during these Maru is like a very steady force, and I’m super interested in seeing that flipped around. So… Sebastian making recoveries (but still with his shit ofc) and Maru slipping back into uncertainties. A fun new dynamic, maybe? I hope so!


	9. Chapter 9

Shane feels weird whenever anyone’s on the farm other than himself and Ry. He feels weird when Leah comes over to “draw inspiration from the landscape” or whatever it is she says, or when she comes to help Ry with foraging, or just hang out. Ry’s always inviting him to have dinner with the two of them, but he just can’t seem to stomach the idea. He feels weird now that Sebastian’s here, not exactly often but often enough to make him edgy.

He feels strangely possessive of the place. Strangely possessive of his friendship with Ry. Almost in the same way he feels possessive of Jas, doesn’t want her running off with that unpredictable Vincent kid. Jas won’t have any of that though. She’s old enough now that if he tries to set boundaries for her she’ll break through them out of principal. Fair enough. Healthy enough. Hurts anyway.

This morning it’s Lewis. He’s giving Ry the annual invite to the harvest festival. Ry’s nodding through his speech about how the reputation of pelican town relies on the farm. She’s trying to stay impassive, but Shane can tell she’s gritting her teeth. She has more patience for Lewis than almost anyone, but today it seems wearing thin.

Instead of coming to her aide, because he’s unconsciously still a little pissed about Sebastian hanging around, he leaves the farm.

It would be good, he thinks, to have a morning walk. To go say hi to Jas.

But Jas is already on her way to school and Marnie’s at weekly aerobics. So he aimlessly walks to town. He’ll just loop around back to the farm. He’s already feeling stupid for doing this; he shouldn’t have left Ry like that.

He sees Alex packing his truck with his tools, getting ready to save someone in the valley from their broken down vehicle. Shane doesn’t think anyone will notice so he allows himself to stare. _How can someone be so powerful and yet so meticulous and gentle at the same time? Yoba, gentle??_

He blinks when he notices Alex sees him, feels caught and cornered so there’s no point in looking away. Alex just raises his hand in a slow good morning salute before getting into his truck.

Shane nearly smiles and waves back.

_Waves back?_ It’s such a small thing, but it feels immense.

* * *

When he gets back to the farm Ry’s in one of her deep moods. A mood where she has this scowl on her face like she’s in the very depths of her thoughts and cannot be roused from them, but carries this pulsing energy in her hands like she could crush something. It’s been awhile since he’s seen her like this.

“You good?”

“What? Yeah. I’m going to the mines.”

“Today?” It was a clear, crisp fall day. The kind of day that’s perfect for being outside and _not_ in a mine.

“Yes.” She nods, scowling.

He takes a deep breath, “I’m sorry I left you to deal with Lewis.”

She looks at him, but he can tell that she’s very distant, that that’s not the reason she’s the way she is.

“Doesn’t matter.” She says, and then throwing her pick axe over her shoulder, she leaves.

* * *

Harvey almost chokes when he walks into his waiting room and sees Elliott there. He tries to pass it off as a little cough.

“Did I forget you made an appointment?” He asks as he pushes his glasses up his nose, even though he knows perfectly well he didn’t forget that Elliott made an appointment. Anyone else he might forget.

“No, not at all, doctor.” Hearing him say _doctor_ sends a shiver down Harvey’s spine. What on earth for? He _is_ a doctor, everyone calls him that!

“Please, call me Harvey.” He insists.

“Very well, Harvey.” That’s not any better. Elliott’s giving him this mischievous grin that he can’t read and he’s feeling like me might throw up. _Yoba, what a bad look that would be._

“What can I help you with?” He says, looking down at his clipboard because he can’t keep staring.

“I thought I might return your clothing.” Elliott puts a bag full of folded clothing, Harvey’s folded clothing, up on the counter between them.

“Oh, I completely forgot about that.” He had not. He had initially forgotten to bring his clothes back with him from the beach, had trudged home in Elliott’s slightly too short trousers and sweater, but every day since he’d thought about going to the beach to exchange them back. He hadn’t had the time, or worked up the nerve, to actually do it. “Let me just run up and grab yours.”

He does run. All the way up the stairs, by the time he gets to his room he’s panting.

_Just ask him out! Just ask him out!_ He’s thinking over and over again. Elliott had been flirting with him the entire time he’d been in his home that night. The man had unnecessarily jumped into the ocean to save him! Ok, maybe it had been slightly necessary, but still!

Plus, he’s a grown adult. He can handle rejection.

Back down the steps, he hands Elliott his own clothing back.

“Thank you, by the way. For saving me.” Harvey wanted to say it emphatically, wanted his tone to convey some sort of deeper meaning, instead he ended up sounding shy and nervous. He should know by now he can’t escape sounding like that.

“Of course,” and Elliott takes the clothing with one hand and places his other on Harvey’s.

Harvey looks at their hands. Feels the warmth from Elliott traveling up his arm directly into his face. _Ok, just do it. Ask him._

He stands there with his mouth open, undoubtedly blushing, for a few moments longer than he intends to. Elliott doesn’t move his hand right away. It almost seems like they could stand like that forever. Until the door opens and someone walks in.

Harvey’s the first to flinch.

“Maru! How nice to see you!” He says way too enthusiastically, taking his glasses off to wipe them clean on his shirt. “Can I help you with anything else, Elliott?” He asks, only able to see a blur of a body in front of him.

“Ah, no. That’s all. Take care, Harvey.”

He doesn’t put his glasses back on until the door closes behind him.

* * *

Maru’s on her way back from her first shift working at the clinic, feeling a little morose, when she sees a strange figure moving through the twilight towards her. Her heart stutters before she realizes it’s only Ry. She didn’t recognize her because she’s covered in dirt, soot and slime.

She realizes she’s stopped walking and is now quite openly staring. “Been in the mines?”

“Sure have.” Ry says, though not in her usual friendly voice. For the first time since meeting her, Maru has the impression Ry doesn’t want to talk to her.

Though their paths seem to inevitably converge. Something flickers across Ry’s dirt streaked face that Maru can’t interpret and then it’s gone and she’s asking how working at Harvey’s is going.

“Same as always.” Though her lack of interest in learning more about the medical profession certainly isn’t. Maru finds her step lingering, something about Ry not wanting to be around her making her feel stubborn.

That momentary hesitation from Ry is hidden now. Walking closer, under the awkward bulk of whatever it is she’s carrying, Ry reaches into her pocket and pulls out something small. She holds what appears to be a dirty piece of glass out to Maru, “have any use for this?”

Maru holds out her palm and Ry drops it in. She rolls the thing between her fingers. It’s not glass. “It’s a diamond.” She says it because she thinks Ry must not know. Couldn’t possibly know the value she was simply handing away.

But Ry just shrugs, “don’t have a lot of use for pretty things, I go for the ore myself. But maybe you-?”

“The old me.” Maru says, handing it back, “not anymore.”

Ry’s fist closes around it and there is brief contact between their fingers, “of course.”

“You have a cut.” She notices Ry’s forearm, resists the strange urge to reach out and touch her again. Wrapped in a dirty piece of torn cloth, blood soaking through, is a small but rough looking patch.

“Do I – oh, that. Heh, it’s fine.” Ry twists her arm to inspect like it’s completely slipped her mind. Maru figures she’s faking it.

“Don’t act tough.” She’s still in nurse mode, irritated by the patient who inhibits healing by brushing off the problem.

“I’m not it’s-”

“Going to get infected. The mine is full of pollutants, toxic slime, bacteria, who knows what else.” Maru recites impatiently.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m gonna hop into bed without taking a shower first.” Ry tries to joke, but there’s an edge of irritation behind it. It’s the first time Maru’s ever heard it from her, she doesn’t expect it.

Maru frowns, “you should go to the clinic.”

“It’s closed.”

She raises an eyebrow at her.

Ry’s filthy face breaks into an embarrassed smile when she realizes Maru of all people already knows that. Concedes to, “in the morning.”

Maru shrugs, “your body.” She no longer feels whatever spell was keeping her there – like if she lingers Ry will snap at her. She feels a strange sense of dissolution. Suddenly Ry is not a fixed person who’s opinions of her don’t matter. Suddenly realizing that Ry is fully capable of disliking her – or of possessing a cold neutrality – puts a sick feeling in her gut. She quickens her step home.

Ry doesn’t follow her, doesn’t say anything, just walks towards town. Which is strange, Maru thinks, is she going to get Harvey after all? Why wouldn’t she be headed for the farm?

* * *

Shane’s on Ry’s front porch, waiting. It’s dark now, getting into a chilly fall night, and he’s wondering if his boss won’t be making it back this evening. The only thing keeping his worry in check is his anger at her for leaving him to manage the entire farm on his own. He’d expected her gone a few hours, not the entire day.

Eventually he sees her coming down the path, from town, not through the mountains.

He gets up from his rocking chair and goes to lean against the post at the top of the steps, crossing his arms. “A little late, isn’t it young lady?” He says mockingly.

She rolls her eyes at him. She looks exhausted underneath all the filth.

“Sorry mom.”

“You weren’t in town looking like that, were you?”

“Yoba, you _are_ my mom.” She brushes past him and goes into her house. He’d think that was the end of the conversation if she hadn’t left the door open for him to follow.

He watches as she gets herself a glass of water and downs it in one go before refilling the cup again.

“I was at the community center.”

“Shit, you’re not still doing all that stuff for the wizard are you?”

She shrugs, “I found some stuff in the mines.”

“Like what?”

“Void essence.”

“The fuck is that?”

She just shrugs, gulping down more water.

“Well, the farm is good, taken care of, thanks for asking.” He says sarcastically, though without much bite.

She exhales, putting her glass down, “I woke up feeling… y’know. I didn’t mean to be gone so long.”

“But you were.”

She scratches her head, “yeah… I was.” She sits down heavily at the table, leaning back in her chair, “I’m sorry, Shane. You can take tomorrow off if you want.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“I know.” She sighs, putting her head down on the table. “ I wasn’t built to run a business.”

“No, you definitely weren’t.” Shane agrees.

* * *

Maru feels nervous, for some inexplicable reason, the next day at work, staring out at the blank waiting room from her position behind the counter. Nervous like something’s going to happen today.

Harvey comes in to refill his coffee from the pot they keep constantly warm. He hardly nods at her in greeting.

“Another sleepless night healing the world?” She says mildly.

“Huh? Oh. Yes. Looks like you too.” And he pushes himself back through the door before she can ask if it’s because Ry stopped by. Had he been up all night because her injury was worse than it had looked? Maru feels a pang of guilt.

There’s no file for her to type up about it, but sometimes that gets left out with a late night emergency. She wonders if Ry had gone home and bled to death? If her cut had gotten so infected and swollen throughout the night that her arm was going to have to be amputated now?

She pushes that to the back of her mind. Not her responsibility unless Ry crosses the threshold of the clinic and asks for help.

She spends the morning organizing Harvey’s supply closet. Dull work but it keeps her mind of off things. The only person who comes in is Kent. After she refills his prescription and he heads out Harvey surfaces again.

She’s about to warn him about his caffeine intake, assuming he’d come for yet another cup of coffee, but then she notices he’s hanging up his lab coat, and his clothes look like he might have ironed them.

“I need to head out for a second.” He mumbles, like he’s hugely embarrassed by this.

“Like you’re always telling everyone else, it’s good to take breaks.”

“Uh yes…” He says it awkwardly and Maru can’t for the life of her think of why.

He repeats, “I need to head out for a second.” Very quietly, before heading for the door. _Is he up to something? Or has it been so long since he’s taken a break he doesn’t know how to anymore?_

Right as Harvey’s hand touches the door someone pushes it open.

“Oh. Ry.” He says dumbly.

“Harvey.” Ry nods, “kinda promised your employee that I’d stop by today, had a mild incident in the mine.”

“I have to head out for a second.” He repeats for the third time and Maru really can’t believe it now.

“What? Harvey, she needs medical attention.” Maru calls, jumping off her stool.

“I think it’s fine,” Ry starts to say.

“Good, yes. It’s fine. I have to head out for a second.” And he leaves. He _leaves._

Ry turns to look at her with a bemused look on her face, Maru stands there with her mouth hanging open.

“I can’t believe he just did that.” She says more to herself.

“Where’s he headed?” Ry asks casually, walking in.

“No idea.”

“Yes… well, I _do_ think my arm is fine, but…”

“But it’s infected now and starting to swell up and hurt a lot?”

Ry winces, “I wouldn’t put it so… seriously.”

“Come on. I can take a look.” She motions with a nod to the back room, “hopefully Harvey really only meant a second.”

* * *

Harvey has a habit of going deep into things. His own thoughts, his work. It’s part of what makes him a good doctor. However, he’s been accused of not being very adaptable, and that’s true to a point. It would seem contrary to being a good doctor, when he’s dealing with surprising and sudden illnesses and incidents all the time, but when he’s in the mode of _doctor_ it’s easy for himself to evolve within that role, to be what is required of him.

It’s on slow days, on days when he actually has a minute to breathe and expand outside his role, that he might get a little off track. Might start diving a little too deep into unprofessional thoughts and be unable to shake them.

Since Maru had been back working at the clinic Harvey had experienced the gentle relief of not having to do everything himself. Suddenly he doesn’t have to give check-ups, order supplies and refills, distribute medications, handle the finances, the upkeep of the building, maintain the necessary level of cleanliness, write reports, and keep himself updated on new studies – all by himself. He’d become accustomed to having a constant stress headache, and the first morning he woke up without it he almost thought something was wrong.

He had time to breathe. He had time to think… but think about what? His life seemed suddenly so dull and empty. Well… Not _suddenly_ , he’d thought that for a while, but before it hadn’t been a matter of choice.

Now he has all this time to think about how embarrassing he is! He almost wishes he could bury himself in work just not to think about how pathetic he’d been when Elliott had come by. Why had he ushered him away like that? Why can’t he have a civil conversation? Around and around these thoughts go.

Eventually though, he realizes he needs to make a change in his life and he knows exactly what he wants it to be.

Sitting in his office, with an empty second in his day, he finds himself thinking “I need to tell Elliott that I want to get to know him better.”

This thought grows throughout the morning. Becomes more predominate. He lets it happen. He knows he won’t be able to act until it’s screaming at him. He thinks this will take him until the end of the day, but he’s wrong, he doesn’t even make it to lunch.

He checks his schedule.

Nobody has an appointment, Maru can handle anything that needs immediate attention. It’s logical to go now, _isn’t it?_

So he’s out the door and halfway to the beach before he even knows what he’s doing.

In his head it was casual.

It was seeing the other man on the beach and he asks Harvey what he’s doing there and Harvey just says, “fancied a walk” and then he says, “you want to walk with me?” and Elliott says yes, and then Harvey says, “I want to get to know you better” and it’s not weird or unexpected, it’s just sweet and Elliott smiles and says “that would be very nice,” and in that smile, and in those words, there’s an understanding of what Harvey really means by that, but it doesn’t need to be said explicitly between them, and slowly, as the weeks and the months pass and they do get to know each other more, things become more serious without anyone having to say anything and it’s just simple, it’s nice, and it’s easy.

It’s not Harvey hammering on Elliott’s cabin door like a maniac.

“Yes, coming!” He hears Elliott’s musical voice call and it hits him in the chest what the hell he’s doing.

He’s winded when Elliott opens the door, and he’s not helped to words by Elliott with his blouse half undone.

“Harvey, what a lovely surprise.” Elliott smiles a smile like he actually does think it’s lovely, but when he leans against the doorframe with his arms crossed there’s something about the posture that makes Harvey feel like he knows something is up.

“Um. I hope I’m not… disturbing a writing session.”

“Only a welcome disturbance from staring at a blank page.”

“Elliott I…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know why I came.” That hangs in the air on its own for a moment, really settles in, and then Harvey exhales and shakes his head. _No, he’s not doing this._ “That’s not true, I do. I um… just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for shoving you out of the clinic the other day, I was… um… anyway, I want to get to know you better.” He blurts it, he can feel his face burning. _Subtle, simple and easy._ Harvey wants to bury his face in his hands he’s so embarrassed. Wants to run away back to the clinic. As if – _as if_ – Elliott, the _writer_ , would be impressed by that verbal catastrophe.

Instead what happens is Elliott grabs him by the belt buckle and pulls him to his lips. The rush of heat in Harvey’s face encompasses his whole body. It only takes him half a second to respond, to tangle his hands in Elliott’s long locks. He tastes faintly like the sea, but also sweet, smoky, everything he wants.

“Harvey dear, I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I want to get to know you better.” Elliott murmurs when they pull away to catch their breath.

They stand that way for a moment, clutching each other and breathing heavily in Elliott’s sandy doorway. Harvey feels tingly, feels like he must be dreaming but for he’s too alive to be dreaming.

Then he remembers.

“Oh yoba, Ry!” He releases Elliott and takes a stumbling step back.

Elliott laughs, “Ry? Are you having an affair?”

“No!” He yells quickly, horrified that Elliott would think such a thing, though he can see in eyes now that he was only joking. “She’s at the clinic, I _left_ her there. Yoba, I’m a terrible doctor. Elliott, I have to go.”

“Of course, but you’ll join me again tonight.”

The confidence in that sentence makes Harvey’s heart flutter and he stumbles in the sand again, repeating softly, dazedly , “I’ll join you again tonight.”

Elliott’s delighted laughter follows him up the beach as he runs.

* * *

Maru pushes a stray hair behind her ear before pulling on her medical gloves. She can feel Ry’s gaze on her, and she wants to look up but she remains focused on organizing everything in front of her.

Harvey had not been a second. He hadn’t even been a minute.

“How did you clean this out?” Maru asks after taking a look at the wound. It wasn’t a terrible job, but she needed stitches for sure.

“Antiseptic swabs.”

“It’s going to scar.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Did you… did you _work_ this morning? Last night?” She can tell from stress around the cut, how it looks like it’s been reopened.

Ry can’t suppress a guilty look.

Maru shakes her head, deciding not to lecture on that, “you should have come in earlier.”

“It’s still technically morning…”

“It’s 11:56. But I meant last night, right away.” They don’t say anything for a while as Maru begins stitching. _Technically_ Maru isn’t allowed to do this, but she’s had informal training. Besides, she knows how to do it, and who knows when Harvey would be back? She can’t leave Ry like this indefinitely, not when she did – sort of – listen to her and come in.

She’ll only need six or seven stitches, but Maru’s a little out of practise and slow going, but careful, steady. Ry doesn’t wince, doesn’t even look away. She begins to believe that Ry hadn’t noticed the cut last night.

“I should have offered to do it when I saw you.” She says quietly.

“Oh, Maru, no.” Ry says in a hush, shaking her head.

“It’s my job.” She states.

“You were off duty.” She feels Ry’s half smile, though she doesn’t look to see it.

“Doesn’t matter.” Maru mutters.

“I wouldn’t have agreed.” This interests her, what it could mean.

She decides not to ask, to be bold in an assumption, “that’s annoyingly hyper-masculine of you.”

Ry falters for a half second, giving away that she wasn’t expecting that response. “Heh, I think it’s more of a mom thing.”

“You’re not looking out for anyone else though.” Maru points out. _Unless she’s got a secret hoard of kids at the farm._

“Says who?”

Maru looks up at her then, surprised. _Does she have a secret hoard of kids? Does Shane count? The farm animals?_ She decides not to ask and goes back to finishing her work.

“I was in a bad mood yesterday.” Ry volunteers and Maru doesn’t say anything, afraid if she does Ry won’t keep talking. She has the excuse for silence by focusing on tying the knot of the stitches. Ry goes on, “I try to claim that going into the mines to smash shit will help me but-”

Harvey busts through the door, “dear yoba Ry I’m so sorry!”

Ry’s lucky that Maru had just snipped the thread, otherwise she certainly would have jumped and fucked up the stitching. She feels a pang of wishing Harvey hadn’t showed up at all.

“Ha, all good Harv. Maru fixed me up.” Ry says lifting her arm to show off the neatly sewn up skin.

Harvey glances at it and then at Maru, a cloud passing over his face.

Ry’s about to get up and leave but Maru stops her. “Wait. Let me put a bandage over it.”

“I should never have left like that, terribly unprofessional.” Harvey says, though sounding slightly distracted now, still giving Maru a look.

“It’s alright, really.” Ry shrugs.

“No, it’s not.” He says firmly, turning back to her.

Ry doesn’t seem to care about Harvey’s misstep and changes the subject, “where’d you head off to in such a rush?”

“Uh…” Harvey’s face goes pink, “house call.”

Ry nods slowly but Maru can tell that she doesn’t believe him. _She_ definitely doesn’t believe him – knows perfectly well there was no house call scheduled and that nobody had called in – but they both drop it.

“They aren’t dissolving stitches, so you’ll have to come back in ten days to get them removed.” Maru says after she’s finished wrapping Ry’s arm. “And you should change this bandage regularly.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to book you in, so you’ll have to come in on time or pay a fine.” Maru flashes Ry a warning look to which she responds with her own amused smile and nod.

After Ry leaves and Harvey walks her out, Maru starts cleaning up the operating room. She wishes she had heard the end of what Ry was saying before Harvey showed up and knows she probably never will. There’s also the feeling of relief, that Ry’s lack of usual friendly composure hadn’t had anything to do with her. Was she imagining that Ry had mentioned the bad mood because she wanted Maru to know that? Or had she just said it, for something to say?

Harvey comes into the room and leans against the wall. He watches her without saying anything for a moment, and she feels herself tense for a confrontation.

“Maru, you can’t give people stitches.”

“Well I did, so I think that proves I can.” She says without looking at him, methodically sanitizing her forceps and scissors.

His body language is tired but his face is rigid. He doesn’t even take off his glasses. “I could lose my practicing license if someone found out that I had someone unqualified providing medical treatment like that.”

Maru doesn’t have a response to that, just a sinking pit in her stomach.

“You’re trained, legally trained, as an aide, not a doctor.” He continues.

“You were _gone_.” She points out, quietly, but with a tinge of venom.

“And that was inexcusable of me, but still Maru. That wasn’t a life or death scenario.” He says matter-of-factly. He’s only master of that tone in here, anywhere else, any other confrontation, and Maru knows he’d be a stuttering mess. Knowing this, knowing she’s the only one who has to endure this side of him, sends a flare of anger through her.

“Nobody is ever going to find out. When do they ever check up on us out here? And you _know_ I’m capable.” She says, tossing the bottle of antiseptic and gauze haphazardly into the cupboard, abandoning her meticulous care.

“I think you should go home.” He says in a tired voice, his eyes pained.

“Are you firing me for being competent?” She says, looking at him through narrowed eyes, almost daring him to do it.

“Yoba Maru,” Harvey puts a hand to his forehead, “I’m not firing you. I think you need to clear your head. We both do.”

Maru wants to spit fire back at him. Wants to say she quits. She doesn’t though, just breaths in deep, clenches her fists, releases them and exhales.

“I’ll go.” She says, and she walks past him without a glance. Why is she always punished for knowing how to do things? Why is this the thread of her adult life?


	10. Chapter 10

Growing up Maru had been the pride of her parents, especially her father. She’d been the pride of her school too. She didn’t understand that her ability to succeed was also due to special allowances. Extra time in the labs, pardons from school to go to special “smart kid” camps, invitations to participate in science fairs, grants for equipment. Learning came naturally to her, so it only seemed natural that all the other stuff should follow too.

It wasn’t until she was in the city that she experienced her first true block. Up until then the only real things she’d run into was her own lack of knowledge, and that was only a challenge, a puzzle to solve. She’d never had to compete against serious rivals. Big fish in a small pond.

At school in the city everyone was brainy like her. It was an elite program and it attracted the smartest and most determined students, and a lot of them had grown up in urban centers, grew up competing with the brightest and best. She wasn’t accustomed to that and quickly found herself floundering, suddenly reduced to regular, average.

No more extra attention.

_Could she do this without it?_

It was a startling realization. It was also an embarrassing realization. She wasn’t, at that time, the type to let it get her down. She worked furiously hard. Her memories from the first two years of her program are swampy at best; murky in the swirl of living for only a single purpose. She can’t exactly pinpoint when she stopped being driven by curiosity and passion, when she gave over completely to proving herself. At first it had seemed like a marvellous opportunity, like she was unlocking her highest potential.

By the time she was in her third year she had, to her mind, proven herself. But that didn’t seem to matter. It was _you can’t do that without a permit_ or _you have to wait six months to ten years to be approved by the board_ and _you need a PHd to be allowed to do that thing we know you’re 100% capable of._

She’d built a yobadamn AI robot when she was _seventeen years old_ in her _childhood bedroom_ , and now she wasn’t allowed to make one because the University didn’t think she was “qualified” enough to enter the lab without faculty supervision.

The last two years of school felt like a painfully drawn out fight to be allowed to do her best. In the end it wore her down and she wasn’t sure she even cared anymore. In the end she just felt stupid. She’d never felt that way before.

So she’d retreated home, at the very least thinking she’d have the opportunity to do what she pleased. Though she had no idea what pleased her anymore.

She knew her reaction to Harvey telling her off yesterday was too emotional. She knew she was being reasonable, and that following the rules in the medical profession, of all things, was probably the exact place rules needed to be followed most. She had crossed the line.

The similarity of the incident to her past experience had caused her to flare up, she knows this too. She doesn’t know how to explain this to Harvey, not without divulging the full pathetic past.

She settles with apologizing, and having to allow Harvey to think she’s ridiculously stubborn and hot-tempered. Maybe that wouldn’t be so far from the truth, she can’t tell.

When she shows up to work she goes to his office before changing into her uniform. She has a sick feeling like he still might fire her.

“Harvey… I’m sorry about yesterday. I kinda of… have a thing about people telling me what I can’t do.” She finds she can only look at her shoes when she says it. Is she afraid of the matter-of-fact Harvey, or the kind Harvey?

He swivels around in his office chair to look at her, “yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“I really don’t want to put your practise in jeopardy. It won’t happen again.”

“No, I don’t think it will.”

Looking at him now, “are we okay?”

He sighs, “of course we are. You’re such a help here Maru, really it is lovely to have you back.”

“Thank you…” She’s not sure if she feels relief. Does she deserve this kindness? Does that matter?

“What is it? Do I have something on my face?” He rubs a hand along the corner of his mouth when she stares at him too long.

“No…” In truth she was contemplating telling him off for not scolding her harder, instead she changes the subject. “Are you going to tell me about the ‘house call’ you went on yesterday?”

“Uh…” Harvey’s ears go pink.

“Because you know that I know there wasn’t a house call…”

“It _was_ a house call… just not exactly a professional one.”

“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow.

He brings his hand to his forehead, “yoba, that’s not what I meant. Well, yes it kind of is.”

“Who?” She asks plainly.

“Elliott.” Harvey breathes, face fully read, a smile he can’t stop pulling at his lips. He starts fanning himself with his clipboard. When he realizes he’s doing this he immediately drops his giddy expression and places the clipboard back on the desk.

They look at each other in silence for a moment before both bursting out laughing.

“ I am pathetic.” Harvey laughs, wiping a tear out of his eye.

“You’re way too old to be like this,” she shakes her head in disapproval. “Was yesterday the beginning?”

“Yes. Well… I liked him ever since I read his book.”

“ _Two years ago?_ ”

He goes even more red, “I didn’t think he would ever notice me.”

“But then he jumped into the water to save you and you got some hope, huh?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’m happy for you, Harvey.” Though in honesty she doesn’t really get it, she has always had trouble empathizing with intense emotions, especially romantic ones.

* * *

Jas comes by the farm sometimes to sulk. She’s taken to sitting in the apple tree outside Shane’s window and… he’s not sure really – wallowing? Drawing depressing pictures, reading emo YA novels, painting her nails black. She’s at that age. It freaks him out, seeing that formerly bright kid like this.

Ry tries to tell him it’s a normal phase of puberty. Doesn’t make him feel any better.

“Why does she come here though? If she’s just going to be anti-social. She’s like _pissed_ if I try to talk to her.”

Ry just gives him the are-you-being-fucking-serious look.

“She’s not like me.” He says it more out of the necessity for it to be true, in reality he can’t tell where him and Jas overlap.

Ry frowns, perhaps detecting his distress, and takes another approach. “There’s not a lot of logic to the prepubescent mind, Shane. She’s probably outgrowing Marnie’s rules for her and feeling a bit stifled. She _literally_ only has Vincent to talk to.”

“I don’t trust that kid.”

Ry rolls her eyes, “too bad.”

“I feel like I can’t do anything.” He would never express this earnest worry about another topic, but this is _Jas_. He’s terrified of her ending up like him.

“Support her interests.”

“She doesn’t seem to have any beyond sulking.”

“Try to show her some new ones.”

“Like what? All I know is animals and she lives on a yobadamn ranch.”

“Throw a gridball around, take her fishing.”

He’s sceptical, “she seems pretty girly…”

“Ah yes, because being feminine and being athletic are mutually exclusive, totally forgot.”

Point taken.

So he tries.

He feels incredibly awkward about it, but he tries.

“Uh Jas, you want to learn how to throw a gridball?”

“I know how to throw a gridball.” She says without looking up from whatever angst-ridden book she’s reading.

“Alright, show me.”

“No.” She turns the page of her book.

Okay… so that didn’t work.

“Want to go fishing?”

“No.”

A last, desperate effort. “Want to… go to the mall?”

That at least gets her to look at him. “The mall? With you? Is that a joke?”

“No.”

“I’d rather play gridball and fish at the same time than go to the mall.”

Alright, so he struck out.

“I think she hates me, Ry.” He says to her the next time their paths converge.

“She doesn’t hate you. At least not in an actual way.”

“Just in a fake way, then.”

“Just in a fake way.” Ry pats him on the head and then heads off to check on the pomegranate trees. He doesn’t feel any better. Mostly because he doesn’t think it is fake.

He’d fucked up with pretty much everyone in town. He knows he was an insufferable asshole, but he doesn’t know the extent to which he was because there’s so much fuzz clogging up his memories. He prefers it that way, most of the time. Makes it easier not to have to wince every time he encounters someone from town.

Something he’s only ever admitted to Ry is that he doesn’t really care that much. He knows that because he’s sober and balanced now he’s supposed to be nicer to people and a better citizen, but it’s not like his sober mind _enjoys_ the people of Pelican town any more than he used to. He tries to be decent and not outright disrespectful, and he’d done his rounds in apologizing to the people, but does he actually give a shit if Lewis likes him? Or Pierre or Jodi?

No. He really doesn’t.

He’s glad that Ry and Emily accept him, know him well enough to see how he’s changed, and that’s enough. Apologizing to Gus had wracked him with nerves before he’d worked up the ability to do it because he knew he’d caused that man pain more than once, but to the rest of the town he’d just been unpleasant. He still thought of himself as unpleasant, so was that really worth getting worked up over? It was just him.

The only people he feels he actually wants to think well of him are Marnie and Jas.

Marnie was easy to get there, easier than he deserved. When he started going to AA and therapy and seriously dedicating himself to get better she was over the moon, as proud as if he’d been the first person to walk on it. It had often been stifling, when his thoughts had leaned towards thinking he was bound to fail, but he didn’t fail, or hadn’t yet.

But Jas… Jas was a kid. A little kid when he’d been at his worst. He’d missed important days, he’d been drunk on others. And then when he’d gotten better, he’d left her. Sure, he was only a short distance away, but he figured it still probably hurt her, even though he’d _needed_ to do it. How do you make a kid understand that?

He has no fucking clue. He doesn’t even know how to _try_ and make it better. He thought she must like him at least a little bit to choose to come hide out at his place, but it was hard to tell. For a long time he’d opted to give her space, not crowd in on her when the horrible drunken image was still so fresh and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get away from it himself. But he’d been sober long enough now that he couldn’t use that as an excuse to push away anymore.

The _what if_ would always be there, but he can try to make the distance between it and himself as great as possible.

* * *

“Oh hi… I didn’t know you were working here again.” Penny said with an embarrassment that bordered on mortification. She was the first person in that day, an unusually early appointment for them.

“Just started.” Maru said flatly, today was the beginning of her second week back.

“Right well… I have an appointment.” Penny states, rather redundantly. Maru has all the appointments for the entire month memorized, it’s not like there are many.

“Harvey will be out in a second.”

Penny nodded shyly and then retreated to one of the waiting room chairs. She perched herself on the very edge of it, legs folded carefully. Maru had the impression she was trying very hard not to display nervousness. When Harvey came through the door to call her she was up before he’d finished saying her name.

Maru continued with her work, not passing much of a thought to Penny. She was thinking about the evening previous, the first family dinner with Seb back that Alex had been there too. It had been oddly… fine.

Back in school Alex and Sebastian had always had something of a hostile relationship. Seb had been a gangly emo weirdo and Alex had been a meathead jock. As far as Maru knew there hadn’t been any bullying between them, but she remembers hearing Sam, Abigail and her brother’s snide remarks about those “vapid gorillas” on the gridball team, the sneering between the two parties at town festivals.

It hadn’t interested her at all back then, she’d been too consumed in her interest of how the natural world worked to care about social nuance, back then those somehow seeming to be separate entities. But it interested her now. Their polite “please pass the orange purple mushroom pasta” and “would you like some hot sauce?” The neutrality of washing the dishes in silence together.

She was shocked out of these thoughts when Penny bustled quickly through the door from the examination room and rushed for the exit. Penny didn’t look at her, seemed quite intent on not making any eye contact, but Maru thought she spotted the edge of red rimmed eyes.

A moment later Harvey joined her behind the counter with his clipboard held tight to his chest.

“I’m going to have to ask that I type this one up.”

She understands that it’s Penny who’s asked that Maru doesn’t see what the check-up was about. She nods and gets up from her seat at the computer, letting Harvey slide in.

“Why don’t you set up the examination room for Caroline?”

Maru doesn’t protest, doesn’t show on her face that she’s extremely curious as to what happened during that appointment. What would make Penny cry? Was she really sick? Was the amount of time she spent reading tiny print going to make her lose her eyesight completely?

When Harvey left to have lunch with Elliott and she was _supposed_ to be having her own lunch she couldn’t resist the urge to find out. She knew she was on thin ice since she’d illegally given Ry stitches but this wasn’t illegal, as Harvey’s aide she had full access to his patients medical details as she was often the one handing out medications or assisting in operation. It was only extremely impolite and going directly against Penny’s desire.

When Harvey was halfway to the beach she locked the front door and slowly, pretending she felt no urgency, she walked to the desktop, sat down, and accessed Penny’s file, drawing up the latest input.

It was a pregnancy test. _A yobadamn pregnancy test? Penny?_

Maru was so startled by this that she forgot where on the form the results were written and spent way too long frantically searching.

_Negative._

Maru’s body sighed a relief. Until she thought maybe that’s why Penny had been crying. Did Penny _want_ a child? Maru was _not_ ready for that idea.

Feeling panicked she quickly exited out of the file and without thinking turned the entire computer off. She got up, grabbed her jacket and ran out the door. She walked briskly up to the fountain near the old community center and began pacing around, much like Harvey used to do.

 _Yoba, Penny, thinking she was pregnant!_ She knew it had to be Sam. Sam or Connell or possibly both. The idea of Penny with Sam and Connell at the same time made Maru collapse heavily into a bench. Then she got up and started pacing again.

It wasn’t that she was against Penny enjoying two men at a time, it was more the choice of men. She’d tried, and was mostly successful, in shoving the image of Penny stumbling down the beach with the two of them that night at the luau. Now it came flooding back to her and she felt guilt coming along with it too. _Or maybe she didn’t like the idea of Penny with two guys at a time?_ Penny’s still eighteen in her head, like she was before Maru left and unwittingly drove a stake through the heart of their friendship. Even though Penny had very clearly told her she wasn’t her innocent teenage self anymore, Maru hadn’t accepted that.

Penny, her oldest supposed friend, had yelled at her that she wanted nothing to do with her that night on the beach. She’d called Maru a self-centered asshole, or basically had, and Maru had been so righteously put off by it that she’d never tried to make things right. Hadn’t allowed herself to think or care about her afterwards. Now Penny, _bookish shy Penny_ , had thought she was pregnant, and Maru wasn’t able to talk to her about it.

She felt shitty. She felt really shitty.

She’s startled out of her thoughts by an eerie creek of a door and then a slam – Ry, coming out of the community center with an irritated look on her face.

Maru feels too distressed by her guilt to have a conversation with someone and wants to pretend she didn’t see her, wants to run back to the clinic and hide. Better yet, run to the woods and keep pacing around.

“You alright?” Ry asks as she approached.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Maru says too abruptly.

“You seem…” then Ry just shakes her head and bites her lip as she looks away. For some reason that makes Maru feel self-conscious. She doesn’t need to be under Ry’s scrutiny right now, she doesn’t need to now be wondering what it was Ry had been about to say.

“I just… saw something I shouldn’t have.” Maru finds herself saying, even though she doesn’t want to elaborate.

“Walk in on Harvey giving Elliott a physical?” Ry says casually. It had been less than a week and already everyone in town knew about them, much to Harvey’s chagrin.

“No, I’d rather have done that.” She says flatly.

“I bet.” Ry raises an eyebrow, unduly intrigued.

Maru blushes, realizing how Ry was choosing to take her thoughtless statement, _was the farmer always this provocative?_

“I didn’t mean… what I meant was…”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. Patient confidentiality I’m assuming?”

Maru nods, relieved at being taken off the hook from answering, wondering since when in the hell her tongue got so tangled, that wasn’t like her.

“So, um, why were you in the community center?”

“Huh? Oh, Lewis gave me a key when Joja moved out of town.” She shrugs, clearly uninterested in talking about it even though her reply hardly answered the question.

Lewis had had this idea that if Joja left Pelican town they might be able to revive the old building, but then Joja had left, not due to any resurgence of local business, but because the economy dwindled so badly it wasn’t worth it for them to stay. They moved to a more bustling hub a couple towns away. The community center was left to decay. Why the hell a farmer would be hanging out in there was beyond Maru, but she decided not to press.

“You have to head back to work still?” Ry asks her, perhaps to change the subject.

“I should be getting back soon.”

“Too bad.” Ry says and she sounds like she genuinely does think it’s too bad before biding her farewell and making her way back to the farm.

Maru watches her go wondering what the hell she meant by _too bad_. What would she had said if Maru had been free?

* * *

Alex had been avoiding going to the gym while Evelyn was at mah-jong. He really didn’t want to run into that girl again and he also really didn’t want to run into Shane. He figured if he sat in on the games with his grandma there was only the most minimal time period in which he could run into either of them.

The old ladies loved having him around, though his grandma had started giving him these sad looks as she sorted her tiles. Something told him it wasn’t disappointment in how little he grasped the rules of the game.

Then one week she told him not to come.

“What do you mean don’t come?” He’d already picked her up from the home, they were in the car and halfway there. She could have told him before that she didn’t want to go, he thinks, and starts wondering if she’s losing her memory.

“I mean you need to stop coming to mah-jong and do something you actually like.” She says plainly.

He grips the steering wheel a little harder, “I like mah-jong. I thought everyone liked having me there too…”

“You don’t like it, you hardly pay attention. Do you know how disturbing it is, Alex? To see _you_ so deep inside your head? It’s unnatural.”

“So now you’re mad at me for _thinking_?”

“Well at least I still have the comfort of you being slow on the draw.” She says sarcastically.

“Okay, so you’re mad at me for thinking, and you think I’m stupid and bad at mah-jong, anything else?”

She narrows her eyes at him, “I think you need to stop avoiding things.”

_Yoba, did she know about the gym girl?_

Looking back out the car window, “you need to do things you like, for yourself, not just me. We’ve had this conversation already and I just… think you should want more for yourself.”

They drive the rest of the way in silence. At first Alex has incredibly foolish thoughts like _I’ll show her I like mah-jong, I’ll become the best mah-jong player senior ladies club has ever seen!_ When he gets there he silently pulls his gym bag out of the back and heads for the change rooms.

The girl isn’t there, and he’s relieved. He knows if he sees her he’ll have to pretend he lost her number, and then she’ll blush and give it to him again, and they’ll end up going out for dinner sometime and he’ll get attached to her but in a strictly non-romantic kind of way, she’ll want more, and then he’ll agree because he’s afraid to lose her friendship and spend his nights lying next to her naked body, staring at the ceiling and wondering what was so great about ‘having a life’.

Nobody talks to him in the gym and he enjoys the slow strain of working his body. He _had_ been missing coming here, they had better equipment than his own and the weight room in the town spa combined. The flush of increased blood-flow and endorphins helps clear his head and he feels his annoyance at his grandma’s concern start to ebb off. Slightly.

Afterwards he ends up seeing one of the people he was trying to avoid, but realizes he doesn’t mind so much.

“Thinking of joining a modern dance class for pre-teens then?”

Shane whips around to stare at him. He’d been inspecting the board of notices with intense scrutiny before Alex had snuck up on him. Shane’s surprised face fades and he drags his eyes up and down Alex in a way that makes him remember the arrogance of his youth, how he would have interpreted that look. Now he just feels unsure, and wracks a nervous hand through his still-damp hair.

“Think there’s any chance they won’t call the cops if I go for it?” Shane says looking back at the notice board.

“I think they should call the cops on you just for thinking about it.” Alex says, leaning against the wall and watching Shane’s face.

“I’m that dangerous, huh?”

Shane looks him in the eye and Alex finds himself unable to answer.

“It’s for Jas.” Shane elaborates, breaking eye contact. “I think she needs… more.”

Alex wants to laugh, but not in a mocking way. He imagines Shane giving Jas the same talk his grandma had just given him in the car. When it’s not directed at him he realizes how kind of a worry it is.

He’s in the middle of trying to tell Shane that’s _nice_ without sounding condescending then he feels a hand on his shoulder. The hand belongs to Evelyn. Her group has just left the class and all the old ladies say hi to Alex and they slowly walk past him to the exit. He nods at them, acutely aware of Shane’s smirk when that elicits school-girl giggling from the group.

“Hello Evelyn,” Shane says, catching Alex off guard with his amicable tone.

“Ah Shane, don’t you look well.” Evelyn reaches out and takes Shane’s hand to pat in grandmotherly fashion. He looks embarrassed and at a loss for words. “I hear you’re taking care of all those animals up there on the farm now?”

“Uh, yes ma’am.” Shane says awkwardly, like a boy. Alex had never witnessed him use a tone of respect with anyone before.

“No surprise, you were always good with little creatures when you were a kid.”

“You remember that, huh?” He seems genuinely surprised, but Alex isn’t – his grandma always remembers the good in people.

“It’s only the short-term I have trouble remembering. Now do me a favour and look after my grandson too, I’m worried about him.”

“Grandma!” Alex feels himself turning pink.

“What? I can’t do it anymore, and wouldn’t you prefer this strapping young lad anyhow?”

Alex’s brain short-circuits. His grandma had always been a little mischievous but he hadn’t seen it since George died. He was mixed with a sense of gladness and embarrassment that did not compute.

“Don’t worry Evelyn, I think our boy here is doing alright.” Shane’s looking at him with an amused softness he doesn’t know how to take.

_Our boy._

“Oh sure,” and Evelyn winks at Shane like they have a secret conspiracy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is becoming much more of a slow burn than I anticipated, thanks for sticking with it! heat to be turned up soon?


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pure Shane's past chapter so naturally we've got some CW:  
> alcoholism  
> suicidal ideation  
> toxic relationship

Shane was the reason Finn left for good. Not that anyone else in town knows this, or that he can be precisely sure.

Shane’s initial pleasure in the filth of their secret was wearing off quickly, Finn’s derogatory talk going rancid in his ears. He kept showing up at his place, though it was clear now Shane wasn’t putting himself in a better situation, that he was still in the same pit as he’d always been.

He finds himself tangled with Finn again and again. He'll never know what was different about the last night, what happened to make things change. Maybe it was only that he'd reached his limit. 

His body is cold with sweat and his head is starting to hurt. Finn’s arm is draped over him like a constraint. He pushes it off, gets out of Finn’s bed and goes to the fridge for a beer.

“Come back to bed.” Finn says in his huskiest whine. It grates at Shane’s nerves.

“In a second.” He says, opening his bottle and downing half of it in one go, hoping the cool fizz will sooth the pit of growing disgust in this stomach.

“Come back to bed.” Finn purrs again, taking up a ridiculous posture. What had once thrilled him was getting weary.

“I said in a second.” He repeats through gritted teeth.

“Do what I say, country fag.” Finn says with a sneer.

“And if I don’t?” Shane says slowly, placing the now empty bottle on the counter and leveling a stare at the other man.

“Oh, you can’t resist.” Finn says with a dripping confidence.

“Right.” He nods, thoughtful a second. Then reaches into Finn’s fridge and takes the rest of the six pack, scoops his clothes that lay discarded by the door into his other arm, and walks naked out the door. He hears Finn’s protests behind him, but knows he won’t follow. At night, Finn's afraid of his own farm.

He felt a surge of power, maintained it as he made his way to cindersap, enjoyed the stolen brews on the dock there. It began to fade when he was halfway through them, was gone by the time he finished. Why’d he let that stupid man take up so much of his time? Why’d he let himself be manipulated into a quasi-relationship?

When Finn left the next day he felt an absurd burst of pleasure. As did everyone else in town. He’d celebrated by taking Jas to the beach and making her shriek with joy by pretending to toss her into the waves. It had been a good day. He’d felt free. He’d gone home and made them all dinner, Marnie rosy with laughter, forgetting to ‘coincidentally’ run into Lewis at the bar.

Throughout the rest of fall he made an effort to be sober, made an effort to be present in his make-shift family’s life. He slipped a few times, but nothing too bad. Then winter came and the monotony came and the thought that he was still a loser working at Joja with no escape plan came and wouldn’t leave. The ‘not too bad’ slips became the regular.

Sinking back into that routine felt like sinking back into himself. _That’s right_ , he thought, _you can’t escape your DNA._ He continued on this trajectory, soon conjuring up images of morbid accidents resulting in his death. Then it became bigger, it became the cliffs beckoning to him, him knowing exactly what he’d do when the time came, that thought a comforting hand on his shoulder.

In was in the throes of this when he met the new farmer. She showed up half a year after Finn had left and Shane knew nobody wanted anything to do with her since she was related to him.

_If Finn was the old man’s first choice to inherit the farm, how bad is this one gonna be?_ Being the general concern.

“Hey Shane, this is the new farmer.” Emily had tried to introduce them at the bar, she at least having the decency to hide her negative prejudice.

“Hi-” This tanned young person had begun to say to him.

“No.” He said.

“No?” She looked taken aback, but in an amused way.

“No.” He repeated, downing his beer and signalling for another one.

And she’d laughed, like she didn’t believe him. That had irritated him. Everyone knew to take his foul temper seriously.

She didn’t last long at the bar, most likely due to the cold shoulder she was getting from everyone. She didn’t try to talk to him again either, though he’d watch her awhile, studying her face for any hint of Finn.

Every time she saw him after that she would say hi and he would say some variation of ‘fuck off’ and she’d laugh, but never press forward. He wondered if she thought that was going to make him like her, because it definitely wasn’t. He wondered if she was so low on social interaction that being verbally abused felt like a good conversation.

She would tell him later that she’d first laughed out of surprise, because she didn’t think his absolute foulness could be real. Then she’d laughed every time afterwards because she couldn’t believe the dedication he put into maintaining a single state. She never believed it was genuine, even when he did.

The spring passed. He only got worse. When he found himself feeling the same in summer he figured he always would, if not worse. A storm came. Seemed a good enough time to fuck off as any.

It was the wizard who found him shit-faced and breathing squelching mud down his throat. He’d resolved to roll off the side of the cliff into the dark depths of the calling sea, but he’d become so senseless he hadn’t even managed it. He was so gone he couldn’t feel anything and probably would have died from drowning in mud if Rasmodius hadn’t come along and kicked him over so he was face up. He barely registered this happening.

The wizard then knelt, and with horrifying ease for anyone, let alone someone of his age, picked Shane up by his shirt with a single hand. He was immensely tall, not shrunken by his years in the slightest. Shane’s legs dangled, toes barely skimming the mud, and still the wizard seemed to tower over him. Lightning cracked a flash of illumination across the wizard’s impassive old face.

Shane’s head had lolled and he’d mumbled to be put down again. “Just throw me over the side.” Though it came out more like an incoherent moan.

The wizard understood nonetheless. “I will not.”

He passed out under the piercing gaze of the wizard’s eye and for a while he thought maybe the crazy old man had thrown him over the edge, such was his oblivion. Though then the thought struck him that if that were true he wouldn’t be having these thoughts at all.

It crept into his awareness that it wasn’t oblivion embracing him, it was warm clean sheets. When he opened his eyes he didn’t know where he was. There was an IV in his arm and the methodical beeping of some machine he seemed to be attached to.

He continued staring at the ceiling, daring not to think. There was a picture taped there, something to focus on while the doctor jabbed you he assumed. It was of a clear blue sea going on for miles, calm, beckoning. The irony of it made him want to laugh. He would have if his throat hadn’t burned.

He became aware of the open door when the silhouette of someone looking in threw a shadow across the room.

“You’re awake.”

Shane didn’t make a sound. Harvey’s voice, the voice of someone he knew, had broken the spell of unreality. He felt a tear collecting in his eye. There was no avoiding that he was still in the valley. Alive.

Harvey quietly began checking his vitals, injecting something into his IV. Then he pulled his stool up and took a seat beside Shane, letting out a soft breath.

“I had to pump your stomach, and you’re dangerously dehydrated.”

Shane kept his watery eyes on the ceiling.

“It was a close call.”

Shane says nothing.

“I made a couple calls to Zuzu, there’s space in a rehabilitation and wellbeing center there that will accept you, but the choice is yours. We can talk about alternatives if you want.”

He still says nothing, though he feels a slight tremor working its way into his lower lip.

Harvey gets up, “we’ll talk about this more when you’re rested.”

The doctor walks towards the door. Shane’s eyes leave the picture on the ceiling, fall to Harvey.

“Who brought me in?” His voice croaked. He had an image of purple in his mind, of height and strength, but it didn’t seem like it could be real.

Harvey gives him a puzzled look, “you brought yourself in.”

Shane returns the puzzled look.

Realizing he doesn’t remember this Harvey goes on, “you managed to get in here through a locked door, lock it behind you, and… I found you in this bed. I don’t know how you managed it in the state you were in.”

Shane’s frown deepens. They both know it’s impossible, but only Shane knows that there’s _no way_ he did that of his own accord.

“It was only by chance I had a whim to come down and check if someone was here. A strange coincidence."

The day fills itself with strange coincidences.

First Marnie and Jas, which isn’t really that much of a coincidence seeing as Marnie is his emergency contact, but when they hear squawking outside Jas goes to check and comes back with Charlie, Shane’s favourite blue chicken, in her arms.

“She followed us all the way from the farm!” Jas says excitedly, putting her in Shane’s lap. Charlie immediately settles in his lap, her squawks turning to coos.

Harvey’s horrified when he finds out there was a farm animal in his clinic, but he makes some attempt to hide it, mumbling something that sounds like “animal therapy.”

Emily comes by with a bean hotpot which smells weird but when he drinks it his head immediately feels better. She says she had a vision that told her to come, but after that she’s mostly silent, just sits there humming and knitting a ludicrously bright-coloured scarf. She doesn’t even ask what happened.

When she’s about to leave she wraps the scarf around his neck.

“I can’t wear this.” He says, his voice muffled by the thick wool.

“Don’t be silly.” She pats his cheek, “it looks lovely on you.”

“Lovely isn’t really my style.”

“Nothing’s fixed, Shane.” She gives him sad eyes then and he feels himself clenching his fists and has to look away.

The weirdest is when Evelyn comes in.

“Yoba, Harvey’s really gotta work on that whole ‘patient confidentiality’ thing.” He mutters, looking up at the ceiling.

“You leave the good doctor out it, young man.” She sits on the chair beside the bed, “you been in this town as long as I have and you learn to pick up when something is off.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

“Oh, I think it’s just in time.” She pulls a cookie tin out of her massive purse and places it on his bedside table. “You know you remind me of my George, when we were young.”

Shane freezes at this. At this time George was bedridden, everyone in town knew he was near death. Evelyn had taken to wandering aimlessly around town when she wasn’t taking painstaking care of him. There was a lot of speculation that she was losing her mind under the grief.

“You’re harsh and mean, but I know what’s under there. Don’t try to fool me.” She wags an old knarred finger at him. “Being sick makes him go back to the safety of that defense,” she sighs now, looking off to something Shane can’t see. “It’s unpleasant. It’s very unpleasant.”

This is really not the heartening speech Shane would expect from an old lady. In fact, he never thought he’d ever get a speech, or even a word beyond hello, from Evelyn.

“But he’s old and scared, underneath it. So I forgive him. Maybe too much. It’s very difficult. To know the right thing to say. What’s right for yourself and right for other people… I figure we usually get it wrong, don’t you?”

“Uhh… sure.”

“Now you feel better. You’re a sharp young lad, can’t have you wasting your precious youth.” And she got up and left, leaving Shane to feel utterly bewildered.

Later, his memory back in small fragments, he becomes convinced that the wizard had orchestrated the entire day. Him getting to the clinic and Harvey just happening to check if he was there in the dead of night, Charlie sneaking out of the coop to visit him, Emily’s vision and unusual presence of mind to not blab his ears off, whatever the hell Evelyn’s visit had been about.

He felt extremely angry to be played with like this. What was that old bastard trying to do, messing with his head? Trying to make him feel important? Like he mattered? Well, it wasn’t going to work, and he was going to tell the wizard what he thought about this meddling.

Harvey wanted to keep him another night for observation – which Shane suspected actually meant keeping him away from booze and steep cliffs – and Shane agreed with no intention of staying. As soon as the doctor retired to his quarters, assuring Shane he could be down at a moment’s notice if he needed him, Shane slipped out the back door.

The summer sun was low in the sky when he got to the tower. At first he just glared at it. Then he knocked, and once he’d started knocking he began pounding, which soon devolved to kicking the door and shouting.

“Open up you lousy fuck! I know what you did!” He continued screaming and kicking, but not for very long. His head hurt and he was starting to get the shakes from alcohol withdrawal. Should he just go back to the Stardrop and forget it all? The wizard clearly wasn’t answering.

He started walking but the vigorous anger that had compelled him out here had left him and now he only felt sick. He collapsed at the base of a tree, hanging his head between his knees to ease the nausea.

“Hey?” Came a tentative voice from through the trees.

He groans, hoping the voice will go away. He’s really _really_ had enough chats for one day.

No such luck. The farmer appears through the woods, a fishing rod slung over her shoulder.

“Shane?” She asks, he just lifts a hand in a weak gesture of greeting. He doesn’t even have the energy to tell her to fuck off. “That you yelling at Rasmodius?”

Shane sighs, “yelling at nothing. Fucker won’t face me.” He tries not to think about how dumb that sounds coming out of his mouth considering how pathetic he looks at the moment.

She sits near him beneath the tree. “What he do to you?”

_Saved my life,_ but it’s not like he can say that.

“Got any beer?” He asks instead, looking over at her through bleary eyes.

She’s caught off guard. “Uh, not on me.”

“At the farm?”

“I might.” But she’s looking at his shaking hands with a degree of scepticism. He rubs the sweat from his forehead and hides his hands in his hoodie.

“Lead the way.” The mutters, stumbling to his feet. He doesn’t give a fuck how rude he’s coming off right now, doesn’t care at all that he’s only ever been horrible to her. He relies on the belief that she’s the kind of person who is weak to make people like them and will go along with his bad-temper out of some sort of need to prove she’s a good friend. He’d seen this quality twisted in Finn. He’d been so desperate for people to like him he’d become a pretentious ass to protect himself when they didn’t.

They walk to the farm in silence. Shane makes a point of not looking at her, though he can feel her searching glances sweeping him over. He wonders how far he can push her, wonders if he can make her leave town too.

Her property is more cleared out than he expects it to be. The weeds beaten back, new healthy growth popping up all over the place. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t care.

Her house is still dilapidated though it looks like she’s patched it up quite a bit, inside is cool and dark. He hasn’t been in here since he’d left Finn that night. It’s not the same but it reeks of memory. The stench of his ever pathetic self.

She tells him to sit at the wobbly kitchen table and goes to her tiny fridge, she pulls something out and pours it into a glass. This makes him feel he got it right, she is a people-pleaser, going to unnecessary effort.

She places the glass of faintly green liquid in front of him. He doesn’t question it, just assumes it’s some weird farm brew. He knocks it back in one go only to splutter it out again. Vinegar.

“What the fuck?”

“Pickle juice. Good for hangovers.” She says, sitting across from him in a relaxed slouch, hands in her sweater pockets.

“I’m not hung over.” He spits.

“You can’t make me complicit in your self-destruction.” She says, giving him a hard stare. For a second he’s taken aback. There is something of Finn in her straightforward hardness, but it’s application is different. Finn’s hard statements were always attempts to manipulate, petty claims for control.

“Fine, I’ll go somewhere else.” He gets up and walks for the door.

When his hand is on the handle she says, “no one in this town is going to help you.” It’s exactly something Finn would have said. But he would have sad it to alienate him, and he has the feeling she’s implying the exact opposite.

He grips the handle hard but doesn’t move to open the door, “oh yeah? You’re just a stranger here, how the fuck should you know?” He says it with venom. He knows that the other villagers aren’t affording her the same kindness they normally would due to her family ties to Finn. Knows she hasn’t made a single friend in the months that she’s been here. He says it to cut.

She doesn’t reply and without seeing her face he can’t judge if it’s because he hit the mark or that she’s realizing what he said might be true. That everyone’s been watching him drink himself into a stupor every night for nearly a year.

Though they all had, in a way, tried to stop him. It was his choice. Only Finn had ever enabled it.

He rests his head against the door, feeling a shuddering breath force its way out of his lungs. “You’re not like him, are you?”

She doesn’t answer or ask him to elaborate, just asks him where he wants to go.

He rubs his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut like he can’t believe what he’s about to say. “Better make it the clinic.”


	12. Chapter 12

Maru remembers the date of Penny’s birthday better than she does her own parents. It’s a clear number 2 in her mind. It’s the first day of school every year, back when they were kids. It’s more than one memory of cupcakes on the school bus, the sugar crash by mid-morning always worth it. Penny taping the card Maru made her into her locker, leaving it their all year.

The only reason it had slipped by this year was because time didn’t seem to exist for Maru, made no impression. That’s the only reason she can come up with to explain why she forgot. She’d forgotten completely, to the point where she couldn’t even chose to forget, couldn’t pretend, couldn’t decide to ignore it like Penny had ignored her birthday.

She hadn’t noticed her own birthday this year, or for two years before that. Her parents gave her a card and a cake and she consumed these things as if she were at the other end of a tunnel, watching it happen to somebody in a distant, fuzzy alternate existence.

When her parents had asked her if she’d wanted a gift she’d been confused, “what for?” As a kid she’d been easy to please, simply happy in whatever material item she could purpose into some invention. Not doing that anymore, what could she want? There was 50g slipped into her card, an apologetic, “we didn’t know what to get you”.

Now two weeks late Penny’s birthday slips into her mind. A flashing 2 of fall. The fact of remembering this date and the fact of discovering Penny’s pregnancy scare are no doubt correlated, but she can’t get it out of her mind. It circles in and out of her inner vision.

_I’ve been a bad friend._

She’s baking a cake, the easy chemistry of it a soothing motion, when her brother comes in.

“You’re… baking.”

“Yep.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re trying to embellish dad’s habit with pinecone and spiceberry dessert or some shit like that.”

“No.”

“Just felt like baking a cake then?”

She snaps, “since when are you so talkative?”

“Right, I’ll just go sit in the basement and ignore everything.” He says, his voice steely.

She doesn’t respond, just opens the oven and slides in the cake pan. He leaves the room, the slam of the front door following after. Maru begins to prepare the icing.

When she gets to the front of the trailer she is reminded of the last time she’d done this. The stagnant summer heat emanating out of the place. Now it seems to radiate a coolness that makes her shiver.

It’s Penny who opens the door this time. She has a flustered look of pleasure on her face, though it quickly fades when she realizes who it is.

“Oh, ah… Maru?” She says as she looks past her, as if Maru is only standing here by mistake and someone else knocked on the door.

“I’m… sorry I missed your birthday.”

Penny’s eyes snap down to meet Maru’s, “Wh-what?”

“I made you a poppy seed cake… I don’t know if you still like that.” She holds it up to her. The distance of the one step between them seeming impossibly large.

“Yeah, um… I do.” She seems more confused than anything else.

After a second of standing there non-reacting, Penny reaches out and gingerly accepts the foil-covered offering. Then, her eyes narrowing in suspicion, holding it out in front of her like it stinks, “why are you bringing this to me?”

“I missed your birthday…” Maru knows she should probably add that she’s sorry for ignoring her for four years but she’s not sure if she can be sorry for that. Sorry for judging her at the beach? Sorry for assuming she was the same as she was at eighteen? Sorry for breaking into her medical records? She doesn’t know how to say any of this so she just repeats, “I’m sorry I missed your birthday.”

“Don’t be. You shouldn’t have bothered.” Penny says this as if it’s a straight fact.

“I should have been on time.” Maru states, that at least, she knows is true. Apart from the hours shared at school, Penny’s birthdays are always horrible. Pam used to give her books or some cheap girly thing like a headband or a pack of barrettes, but ever since she turned thirteen it was something alcoholic or nothing at all.

She can tell Penny doesn’t know how to react to that so she finishes the conversation for her, “I’ve got to get to work. I’ll see you at the fair tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Penny says flatly before closing the door.

* * *

Ry slams the door of her truck shut and lets out a momentous groan.

“Just one day.” Shane mutters, because he’s feeling it too.

“Just one fucking day.” She says through gritted teeth.

“Maybe we’ll lose this year.” Shane says without hope.

“We actively tried to lose last year and still we won. Though that did help deepen people’s understanding of food expectations. So I guess that’s good.” At the fair the year previously Shane and Ry had displayed the knarliest the farm had to offer. Twisted roots, misshapen and scarred fruits, the weirdest fermented juices and pickles they could come up with, poisonous fungi, cursed looking objects they’d found buried, the funkiest smelling cheese imaginable, mutated fish.

All it did was increase fascination with food production. Any other day they would have rejoiced and been ecstatic to talk about this, but not at the harvest fair.

Every year they continued to win Pierre continued to hate them more and attempt to swindle them harder when they came in to sell their goods or buy seeds. Every year Lewis had the Stardew Valley newspaper write a longer and longer article about them with more and more pictures. Shane and Ry both agreed that the photo-shoot was worse than Pierre’s fury.

Ry had tried to back out the year previously only to be bombarded by Lewis continually until she finally gave in when he threated to set up a tent on farm and never leave. He’d had the tent in his hand, she had no doubt he was serious.

“Let’s do this.” She sighs, as they get into the truck and drive in to town.

* * *

“What is it, Harvey?” Elliott, brushing his hair, shirt still undone, observing him from here he stood by the mirror. Harvey was sitting on the bed, fully dressed, hands folded in his lap.

“It’s nothing. Or rather, it’s something… I just… it’s nothing.”

Elliott chuckles, putting down his brush, “tell me about this nothing.” Just a few weeks they’d been together and already things felt so solid between them.

Looking down in his lap, “I’m nervous.”

Elliott walks towards him, pausing in front of Harvey. “About the fair? About being seen with a lowly author?”

Harvey wraps his arms around Elliott’s middle and buries his face in his stomach. “You know that’s not it.” Though he _was_ nervous about that, but more in an exhilarated way. Being seen with Elliott, Elliott wanting to be seen with him.

Elliott strokes the back of his head before shifting to sit beside him.

Harvey swallows, he has to look away from him say what he’s about to, but he reaches out and takes his hand. “I’m nervous that once you realize I’m not… more than this, more than a simple small town doctor with nerdy interests… that you’ll be disappointed.”

“Oh Harvey…” Elliott reaches out and gently turns Harvey’s chin towards him and gazes into his eyes.

He almost falters under that but presses forward, “I don’t have access to a metaphorical existence like you do. I have no aptitude for creativity. I’m just… me.”

Elliott tilts Harvey’s head back, leans in and kisses his neck, tenderly leaving kisses from chin to the collar of his shirt.

“I don’t need you to be like me, Harvey.” He breathes against his skin.

Harvey grips Elliott’s open shirt in open his hands to keep himself steady, but continues on, “I know sometimes I have this tendency to get lost in my head, and I seem far away. But that’s not… I’m not mysterious.” He finishes weakly, feeling Elliott chuckle against his skin.

“My dear, I like that you are matter-of-fact. I have enough romantic metaphors for the both of us. You can’t build a life on just that, at least not with someone else. I think… I think we round each other out, don’t you?”

“I… I’m worried that the opposites attract thing might not be sustainable.”

Elliott looks into his eyes, cupping Harvey’s face in his hands. He kisses him gently. Harvey closes his eyes and allows himself to feel the pleasure of this moment, however fleeting it may be. He’s greedy for what he can get. Three weeks of not being able to sit still, needing Elliott all the time, demanding touch. It’s not like him, not like how he used to be. But he’s afraid this is all he’ll get.

When Elliott pulls away he wants to chase his lips, wants his physical desire to swallow up his fears, but he forces himself to stay.

“I’m not worried,” Elliott says, kissing his forehead. “And I don’t believe we are so opposite. No, you don’t go around concocting silly ideas, but you are always more than willing to interact with mine. Do you know how happy that makes me? To have someone I can speak freely with, without feeling like I’m coming off as a contrived pompous ass?”

“I love the way you speak,” Harvey mumbles contentedly into Elliott’s hair, but then something dawns on him. “I’m sorry, it’s too early to be having this conversation, isn’t it? We’ve only just started to get to know each other.”

“We’ve known each other for years, my dear.”

“Yes but not…”

“Intimately? Sexually?”

Harvey blushes.

Elliott goes on, “I’ve been charmed by you for years, Harvey, really. Remember when I tried to flirt with you at my book launch?”

“What? Were you?”

“Yes! And you all but ran away. I thought you hated my forwardness.”

“I’m such an idiot. I… I liked it _too_ much, Elliott. I thought you were with Leah, and that you didn’t mean what you said. So I ran because it… did things to me that _I thought_ it shouldn’t.”

“Had I known…” Elliott’s hand travels down Harvey’s body lower and lower, “I surely would have run after you.”

Harvey finds himself sighing into Elliott’s touch. They’re kissing again.

Elliott ends up having to brush his hair again before they make it to the fair.

* * *

Sebastian shoves his hands deep into his pockets. He’s always disliked the fall fair, and though he wasn’t the angsty teenager he was, he still finds it difficult to conjure any level of enjoyment.

Helping his mom set up her stand hadn’t been bad, seeing Clint’s swords was always cool, and Leah had some intense sculptures out this year. But beyond that, the flurry of bright activity waned on him. Part of the reason he’d agreed to help set his mom’s stuff up was that if he showed up early he could probably leave early too.

The tourists, the bustle, nullify the purpose of his retreat home. All he wanted was quietness. Maru clearly doesn’t care for it either. She’s wearing the same distant expression she’s had on since he’s been back.

After helping Robin he looks for Ry, knowing she hates this festival more than any other, and wondering if helping her out might take some of the stress off. He isn’t expecting the flash of purple hair.

“Abbi?”

She places her armload of display items down in Pierre’s box and looks up at him.

“Hi Seb.” There isn’t a lot of emotion in her voice, she doesn’t seem nearly as surprised to see him as he is to see her.

“How long have you been back?”

“Just last night.” She’s not looking him in the eye.

“Back for this?” He asks as a joke, as kids she’d always hated this festival more than anyone else. Maybe more than Ry and Shane do now.

She grimaces, “no.”

“For how long?”

She shrugs, “a few weeks.”

“I wasn’t exp-”

“I’ve got to help my dad.” She looks over her shoulder, gives him a weak apologetic smile, and proceeds to disappear into the maze of Pierre’s ‘best items’ he’s dragged out of the shop to attempt to shove into his display. Every year since Ry showed up he’s gotten more chaotic in his desperation to win.

Sebastian stands there a moment, confused about if he’s confused at Abbi’s reaction to seeing him. Did it make sense? It had been a long time since they’d last seen each other, but he’d thought they’d always be friends. He thought they had the kind of friendship where no matter how long you’re apart you can always pick back up where you left off.

Apparently he was wrong.

Instead of going towards Ry’s display box he turns back to where Maru is standing, now talking with a flushed Harvey who’s tightly gripped around the waist by a proud looking Elliott. He takes a few slow steps towards them but doesn’t make it very far before an arm is slung around his shoulder.

He jumps, having no possible idea who it is, nearly has a heart attack when he realizes.

“Hey Seb.”

Sebastian just looks at him incredulously, his stomach dropping through the ground.

Sam grins at him, “happy to see me?”

* * *

Alex had picked his grandma up that morning to attend the fair. She was a great fan of it, always loving to see how excited visitors got about their little village. Alex also found he liked it more than other festivals. Having more people around made it less intimate, made it less noticeable when he was off on his own.

Back when Haley had been here the two of them would always find a quiet spot to people watch, Haley always brilliant in her insults of the tourist. Thinking of how mean they had been made Alex a little ashamed, but today he lets himself a little smile thinking of it. They had been such dumb kids back then.

He feels a strange sense of nerves, not the usual wish to hide in his own skin. For no reason he can think of, he wants to be seen today, wants to interact with the world.

His grandma seems to pick up on his and doesn’t pester him about getting a life. She doesn’t even suggest he goes and find his own friends, just squeezes his hand before she walks off without him, knowing he’s not going to follow.

Alex does a casual loop of the fair on his own. It’s still early, most people haven’t finished setting up yet and can spare him only so much as a smile and a quick hello. He doesn’t want to disturb, finds himself walking slowly.

It’s not planned that he gets to Ry and Shane’s stand exactly when they seem to be finished setting up. Ry ducks out quickly, seeming like she wants no association between the display and herself, but Shane stands there awhile, scowling at it.

“The display looks really good.” Alex says, thinking he sound supremely stupid as soon as it leaves his mouth.

“Yeah, it does.” Shane says joylessly, still scowling.

“Is that not… a good thing?”

“We’re gonna win again.”

“Don’t want to win?”

“It’s not the winning, it’s what comes with it.”

“Tokens?” Alex asks, feeling slow. He wasn’t involved in anything competitive now, but when he had been he’d been a freak about winning, and everything that came with it.

Shane frowns deeply, “the pictures, the article, the contempt from Pierre… honestly, I think Willy should win for once. Put him on the cover of the paper holding up a smelly dead fish.”

Alex doesn’t know what to say. He used to really like all that stuff back in the day when he’d been anything near remarkable.

“Oh yoba, here’s the photographer.” Shane whispers quietly, head ducking.

Alex turns to look. He sees a trimly dressed man with perfectly set hair and a big camera around his neck. He’s nodding at Shane but then he notices Alex and does a double take.

“Hey man, aren’t you that gridball star?” He asks, holding out his hand to shake. He accepts it, engulfing the other man’s hand in his own. He wonders if Shane’s smirking at him but doesn’t chance a look.

“Uh… that was like ten years ago.” Alex feels his ears go pink.

“I remember taking your photo back then… very photogenic.” The guy his eyeing him up in a way that makes him feel the need to shift.

“Oh ah…” He doesn’t know what to say, feels himself go even more red.

“What are you up to now?” This guy doesn’t miss a beat.

“I run my own shop, mechanics and electrical.” He feels slight relief, he can talk about his work much more easily than his looks and failed sports career.

“Mechanics _and_ electrical?” The guys sounds impressed, and Alex knows it’s unusual elsewhere, but in Pelican town you pretty much have to be jack-of-all-trades if you want your business to survive.

“Yeah,” Alex rubs the back of his head, embarrassed.

“Your shop here in town?”

“Yeah,” Alex gestures over his shoulder. _Yeah, yeah,_ why doesn’t he speak better?

“Look, the paper is trying to highlight local businesses more... help our local economy and stuff. You’d be really helping the community of Stardew Valley if you let me do an article on you.”

“On _me_?”

“Yes,” the photographers eyes shift to Shane and Ry’s display, “this farmy stuff is great, but like… five years in a row? People get it.” He says with seemingly no notice of Shane or his feelings. “But a hot former gridball star turned successful business man? That’s gonna sell.”

Alex seriously doubted that.

“Um…”

“I’ve got to take some more pictures of the fair, why don’t we meet in a hour?”

“Uh…”

“I don’t think he’s interested, man.” Shane says coolly and Alex feels a flush of gratitude spill through him.

The photographer eyes him, “oh, are you that farmer? I don’t mean to be rude but we’re heard enough about you and your dyke wife and your weird vegetables.” He says, very rudely.

“… my dyke wife?” Shane repeats, stunned.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your wife is gay. I can tell from a mile away. Anyway, Alex, I’ll see you in an hour.” He shuffles off, leaving both Alex and Shane with their mouths hanging open.

“I can’t believe he said that about you and Ry… ” Alex says, turning to see Shane’s reaction.

“Oh, that I can believe.” Shane snorts, “guy is a huge dick. He’s interviewed Ry and I _extensively_ four years in a row and every year he forgets our names and, apparently, our marital status. I’m more interested in the fact that he remembers your name after almost ten years…” He smirks, “but I mean, who wouldn’t, you’re a hot former gridball star turned successful businessman.”

There’s something of a taunt in the way he says it, but no ounce of contraidtion.

Alex feels himself burn.

“Can’t wait to read the article.” Shane adds, clearly enjoying Alex’s embarrassment.

Alex frowns and can’t come up with any words.

Shane puts his hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry, man. I can talk to Lewis, I’m sure he’ll nag the guy into featuring the farm again.” The amusement is still in his eyes when he says this.

“No.” Alex says quickly, some weird feeling blooming in him at the touch of Shane’s hand. “You just told me you hate it.”

“But imagine how much fun my dyke wife and I can have pretending to get a divorce in front of him?”

Alex shakes his head, unsuccessfully suppressing a smile. “Like he said, it’s my duty to the community. I’m a former star, this is my moment to reclaim the glory of my youth.”

Shane looks at him squarely, “I don’t think it’s past you just yet.”

Alex accidentally looks him in the eye and feels the air around him become thick like liquid honey.

“And anyway, Evelyn told me to look after you.”

His heart stutters.

_What if he steps closer?_

“Oh there you are, Shane. Where on earth has Ry gotten to? If I didn’t know any better I’d say she was hiding. Anyhow, what’s this I hear about the newspaper not running an article on the farm again? Did you say something to that chap from the paper?” Shane’s arm drops from Alex’s shoulder at the same time his amused expression drops.

“I didn’t do anything.” Shane says exhaustedly, looking to the sky.

Alex feels an enormous sensation of lacking. Like he just missed making the goal that would lead his team to victory.

“Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain? Oh Alex, how are you? Well I hope. Evelyn here with you? Of course she is, I’ve already spoken to her. Wait a moment, you two were chatting before I arrived. That’s new, you aren’t usually together. Anyhow, Shane, please be kind to the photographer, we _need_ this.”

“Lewis, we haven’t even _won_ yet. You better keep your voice down or Pierre’s going to flip.”

“Oh nonsense, everyone knows it’ll be you. Look at this marvelous artichoke! Absolutely terrific, as if Pierre could ever dream of such a thing.”

* * *

Sam keeps his arm slung around Sebastian’s shoulders and doesn’t move it. The old comfortable feel of it isn’t what it once was, but Sebastian feels himself being pressed into the mould of the past. If he gives in, will it be the same? Does he want it to be?

Maru’s now-usual impassive stare takes on something more complicated when she sees Seb and Sam together. She’s cold with them both, evasive. Sebastian wonders if she somehow knows what’s happened between them _but how could she?_

His guts get more mixed up when Jodi says, “Sebastian you must be so pleased to see your old friend again!” with all this simple pride in her face. Sam is the sun to her, he must be for everyone else too, right?

It’s worse when his mother says something similar, though admittedly less Sam-centric and more about the general joy of having friends. Her genuine smile, his weak attempt to return it overwhelmed by Sam’s enthusiastic concession.

Ry’s caught up in the conversation with Lewis, nodding along looking absolutely exhausted, looking past the mayor like she wants nothing more than to be elsewhere. When she sees Seb she gives him a quizzical look. All he can do is attempt to convey a shrug with a facial expression. He tells himself it’s not on purpose that he doesn’t lead Sam over to talk to her.

“Yoba, this fair is more pathetic every year.” Sam mutters when a group of gawky tourists pass them.

“People like it.” Seb says, trying to steer away from _this_ Sam.

“You go in for small town kitsch now, Seb?” He looks at him in the eye with amusement.

“Not what I meant.” Seb looks away, Sam’s hand drifts from his shoulder to his lower back, turning to regard him in the eye. Everything in Sebastian is panicked at the new touch but he remains still.

“Look, what is this shit I hear about you living here again? Working out of the basement like when you were a kid. Do you like being miserable?” Sam asks, that sweet concern has a habit of working its way down Sebastian’s spine, right into the deepest part of him. But he knows now, it’s only fleeting.

“Sam don’t-” He has to move now, has to turn, stillness not enough of a defense.

Sam’s hand moves from the small of his back to his hip. He stills again, doesn’t want to breathe.

“Come stay with me in the city until you can find your own place. I’ve got a futon.” Sam’s lopsided grin, but Sebastian is looking elsewhere. He has to look elsewhere.

“The same futon I’ve seen more than one person throw up on?” A none-too-serious snarky remark, another defense.

Sam beams, “the very one!” He drops his hand from Seb entirely.

Relief.

Seb snorts, “intriguing offer.”

“You can’t stay here my dude! You’re better than that. Get your music act back together, I’ll help you. It’ll be good, like old times.”

He regards Sam for a moment, wondering if he’s really hearing what he’s hearing.

He knows that Sam won’t hear his answer if he’s honest, so he just says “should we see what the fortune teller has to say about it?”

Sam rolls his eyes, but Sebastian knows he isn’t above it, even if he now likes to pretend he is. Any chance he gets to ask about his band’s future, he’ll take.

When they get to Welwick’s stand they catch Abbi coming out of it.

“Abbi!” Sam exclaims, quickly engulfing her in a hug. Shockingly happy to see her despite showing zero interest when Sebastian had mentioned she was around.

“Hi Sam.” She says neutrally, not exactly refusing the hug but not exactly accepting it either.

“Any exciting news about the future?” He asks her brightly.

She looks back at the tent, shrugging, “not so much.”

“Well, I’m going in. But stick around, ok?” And he disappears into the tent.

Abbi seems undecided for a moment if she’s going to stick around or not. He’s so caught off guard by seeing her like this that he can’t think of what to say. She used to be the one forcing conversation with him, not the other way around.

Penny saves her from making a decision, “oh hi Abbi, welcome back.” She smiles shyly.

Sebastian almost does a double take and then feels embarrassed about it. Penny doesn’t look like her usual bookish self. She’s wearing a small sundress that’s weather inappropriate, and either she’s cold or self-conscious because she’s clutching herself in a way that shrinks her. Her hair is in loose curls, framing her face.

“Hi Penny.” Abbi says, it doesn’t escape Sebastian’s attention that she’s making more of an effort to sound somewhat pleased to see her than she had with either him or Sam.

“Have you um, been back long?”

“Just last night.”

“Oh good… did I see Sam was back too?” She successfully keeps her voice disinterested but her cheeks flush a faint pink.

Abbi seems to notice this too and hesitates a second in answering, “uh, yeah… he’s getting his future read.”

Penny nods and looks fixedly at the ground. There’s an awkward pause where none of them know what to say.

“I’ll just wait here,” Penny eventually says, “to say hi.”

“Sure thing.” Abbi says. She gives Seb a sceptical look and he shrugs.

The awkwardness does not pass before Sam comes out. When he does he’s got this funny looking face on, but he quickly hides it. He doesn’t notice Penny right away.

“Hi Sam,” she says quietly.

“Penny!” He scoops her up in his arms. It’s an exceedingly familiar hug that surprises both Seb and Abbi. “Don’t you look nice.”

“Heh, thanks.” She blushes, pushing a curl behind her ear self-consciously, “I’m kinda cold though.”

“Hey, that’s what this is for,” and Sam removes his jacket and wraps it around her slight shoulders. Then he looks over at Seb, “you going in?”

Somehow it feels like a dismissal. Seb gives a single nod and follows the command.

Walking into the tent Welwick lazily motions for him to sit down. She looks into her crystal ball, turns over a few cards, and finally takes his palm into her hand, tracing the lines there with her long yellow finger nails.

“Hmm…” She finally says.

“Yes?” He asks, wondering if maybe that’s all she has to say. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d done that to him.

“You’ve made the right decision.” She nods curtly.

“What decision?” He asks, knowing she won’t elaborate.

She narrows her eyes at him, “you know. Now don’t go unmaking it. Good?”

“Uh, good.”

She waves her hand towards the door.

When Sebastian comes back out it’s only Abbi waiting there, smoking a cigarette.

“Sam and Penny left, so.” She says, blowing smoke.

“So...”

“Just wanted to let you know.” And she turns to leave too.

* * *

Shane is way too damn pleased with himself.

He knows, _he knows_ , he shouldn’t be but doesn’t dwell on the how or why of it. Too dangerous to be getting introspective at a time like this. Not when Jas is smiling naturally, having caught more fish in the pond and won more tokens than Vincent and himself combined.

Not when Marnie, of all people, is taking a stand against Lewis, refusing to compete for best display despite his nagging. _“What’s the point, Lew? You won’t let me win because that would be ‘favouritism’. Though I don’t see how, as seeing in your head our arrangement is a secret.”_

Not when Ry and him are blissfully unobligated to any pestilent journalists.

He’s _not_ thinking about Alex turning delicious pink, of the tension roiling between them, of those lips tumbling opening in surprise. He’s catalogued that for later, for when he’s alone. Where it will undoubtedly be followed by guilt and a self-despising inner monologue, but that’s where the _not thinking about it right now_ comes in so handy.

He’s just letting himself feel good about being alive.

“You’re grinning like a maniac, it’s scaring the tourists.” Ry says to him.

He doesn’t even try to stifle it, “good fair this year.”

She makes a noise in agreement. He knows she’s also over the moon about the article being dropped. She’d laughed a good five-minutes straight when he told her about the ‘dyke wife’ comment.

He can feel her giving him a look, sizing him up.

“Say it,” he wonders how much his mood is about to drop.

“Was thinking of having people over to the farm tonight.” She says, thoughtfully, knowing he’ll hate the idea.

He stays silent, not changing his facial expressing, weighing how that makes him feel. It’s her farm, he knows and she knows that she can do what she likes, but she wants him on board.

“Was talking to Gus before he went to prepare for the usual post-fair saloon night. Does it make me a dick to want to disrupt that tradition?”

Shane shrugs, still analysing his reaction.

“Just a bit. Just a few people.” She says, looking at the ground and scuffing the toe of her boot on it, thinking she’s losing.

“Can’t stop you.” He says.

“Yes, you can.” She admits, looking up into his face now.

“Don’t make me say it.” He grins again, shaking his head.

“Say what?” Her eyebrows crinkle in genuine confusion.

“That I don’t mind.” His grin is wide, because he means it.

She punches him the shoulder, “invite whoever you want, pal.” She says to him, following her punch with a squeeze on the shoulder before going off to make arrangements.

* * *

Harvey, to his credit, doesn’t spend the entire day ogling Elliott, and makes a point of talking to her. Elliott does too. The dynamic is strange to her. Seeing someone making an effort to be friends based on their partner’s wishes/comfort/desires. And Elliott makes it natural, like he’d always wanted to get to know her.

She doesn’t think she’d be able to do that for someone. She’s caught between the realization of that and how nice it feels to be treated with this kindness.

Though it’s nice, she doesn’t have that much of an attention span for it. She’s seen Seb with Sam, locked together – Seb looking at the ground, holding back any number of expressions that would make it possible for her to know what’s going on in his head, and Sam just being Sam, easily cheerful. She’s seen Abbi too, but more specifically she’s seen how she’s not with her brother or Sam.

Later she sees Penny – the dolled up form of Penny, the Penny that was at the beach with Sam. She knows what it means, but what does it mean that Penny still won’t look at her? She hadn’t been dumb enough to really believe a very late birthday cake would change anything, but she thought, maybe, a look, a nod.

Then later still, there’s Penny with Sam, his arm around her and Sebastian nowhere in sight. Penny with Sam again. What she’s expected but still painful to see. He’s not looking at Penny, she’s looking up at him.

And now, Harvey and Elliott being friendly. Chatting about Elliott being too lucky on the wheel of fortune the year previous and being ban from playing forever, about how Marnie quit competing in the display contest this year and Pierre threw a hissy fit when Lewis told him he couldn’t occupy her abandoned space, about the tourist who bought every single one of Leah’s sculptures.

She tries to be present through the conversation. Or tries at trying. Is barely able to acknowledge Ry when she stops to say hi on her way to the path towards her farm.

“So you’ve won again.” Elliott smiles a knowing smile at Ry.

She shrugs, sheepish. “Looks like.”

“And what will you be telling the newspaper this year?” He gives her a mischievous look.

Ry smiles, “not a word. Off the hook by some miracle.”

“Oh yes?”

“Something about Alex’s hotness saving the valley from economic depression”

Elliott frowns, “hmm, if that’s the approach they’re taking you’d think they’d want to photograph the town doctor.”

Harvey turns bright red and even Maru has to smile at that.

Ry chuckles, “send in a formal complaint.”

“That I might.” Elliott smiles, pulling Harvey even closer to him and kissing him on the cheek.

Ry smiles at this, but meets Maru’s eyes, almost as if she’s trying to gauge how she’s reacting. She tries to return the smile.

“Later, if you’re interested, we’re having people over at the farm.” She’s looking at Harvey and Elliott when she says this, so Maru feels off the hook from responding.

“That would be lovely, Ry.” Harvey says, smiling, still red from Elliott’s praise.

“I gotta head back to the farm for a second. Gus wants all the cranberries I can give him for whatever he’s cooking tonight.”

Maru hardly hears this, has become distracted by Sam and Penny in the distance.

“You need a hand?” Harvey asks politely, only a little pink now.

“Think I’ll be alright.”

“I’ll come with you,” Maru says suddenly, because all she’s taken in is _a way out_ and she knows she needs to get away from seeing wherever Penny and Sam go off to. It isn’t her business, she doesn’t want to know.

Ry looks surprised but she doesn’t protest, just nods and starts walking. Maru trails after her.

* * *

“Over there, by the car… Yes, why don’t you just like, lounge against it? Now give me one of your grins. No, not like that, like you just won the regional championship. No, like you did before. Cocky young thing with the whole world in front of him.”

Lewis had tried to talk the photographer back into doing an article on the farm, but when the guy had explained what he wanted to do with Alex Lewis had given in. Now they were in Alex’s garage, Alex feeling gawky and awkward, the photographer snapping away.

“Okay, different direction… yeah, serious is good. Oh yeah, that somber lonely vibe is definitely hot these days… try arm behind the head, good… Now take your shirt off and bite your lip, let’s see if you’re as fit as you were in your school days.”

“What?” Alex said, standing up straight abruptly.

“Heh heh, only joking of course. Not that we wouldn’t love it.”

“Right… Is that good? I’m kinda tired.” In truth he wasn’t tired, he was only tired of _this_ , whatever it was. The guy had spent over an hour grilling him, most of the questions seeming to be about his personal life and not about the business at all. He wanted to get back to the fair in time to see the judging. How would Shane react if they won when he wasn’t on the hook for this _terrible_ interview process?

“I think I’ve got enough to work with here. You’re still a photogenic hunk even though you can’t give that sexy grin anymore.” He says, examining his photos on the camera.

_Yoba_ this guy was making him uncomfortable.

“So, should we go in?” The guy says, not looking up from his camera.

“Yeah, I’d like to get back…”

“No, no, go _in._ ” He motions with his head towards the door into Alex’s house.

“Um… Why would we?”

The guy raises an eyebrow at him and then lowers his gaze to Alex’s crotch.

“No.” Alex says flatly, “we’re not doing that.”

The guy rolls his eyes, “sorry, shouldn’t have expected a jock like you to be _out._ ”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How about you call me when you figure it out?” The photographer hands a dumbfounded Alex his card before leaving him in the garage by himself.

Alex had known exactly what the man had been implying, he just couldn’t believe him saying it to his face.

Back in high school he’d been a sex freak. Him and Haley had started experimenting together when they’d been fourteen. By the time he graduated he’d had sex with nearly the entire gridball team and almost all the cheerleaders. Basically anyone who wanted to fuck him he was down for. Him and Seb had even fucked once, in Cindersap forest one summer. They’d sworn never to talk about it again.

Curiosity and the thrill of the chase had compelled him to be sexually forward but at a certain point he realized he was bored of it. That it didn’t exhilarate him, that he could get a better high going for a run. So he’d stopped with the fucking around and felt no interest in it since. Like that part of him was dead.

Haley told him he just needed to ‘find love’, that maybe he was someone who required emotional intimacy in order to feel fulfilled, but love eluded him, with any type of person. Apart from his school boy crush on Shane back in the day, there hadn’t been anyone to make him excited.

He felt sick about the photographer. He’s not sure if he cares that the guy thought that he thought he was straight; feeling incapable of loving anyone romantically or sexually made him immune to caring how his orientation was interpreted. It was how he said it, like he was stupid. Sometimes he felt like his brain was stuck in the mud and he had to fight extra hard for it to work properly, but he’d thought he’d gotten past that. He liked to think he’d discovered how he learned best and put that to use, learned how to keep up but every now and then someone would use _that_ tone of voice with him and he’d realize maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d just gotten lazy and not noticed he was out of the loop.

He was sitting in the garage by himself when Evelyn found him.

“Alex, honey?”

“I’m here.”

“Finished your big time interview?” She asks softly, sensing something is up as she walks towards him.

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong dear?”

“Just tired. Not used to talking so much about myself.” He gives a weak smile. She squeezes his shoulder. “Did you want to head home?” He asks her.

“Well, only if you’re not busy…”

“Ha ha.” He rolls his eyes and stands, ready for the day to be over.

* * *

Shane had not been looking for Alex _too_ hard. Just keeping a constant wary eye out for him, and when he didn’t find him, standing in full view of his house should he suddenly appear there. Totally coincidental.

When Alex and Evelyn walk out they head directly for Alex’s truck. Shane has to jog to catch them in time. He taps on Alex’s window, his awkwardness and nervousness hitting him full force as he rolls it down.

“Hey, uh… I know you’re heading out but Ry wanted me to tell you you’re invited back to the farm later. We’re having a fire. There’ll be food.” He shrugs but he knows he’s unsuccessful in keeping his tone detached, knows it’s plain he wants him to be there.

“Sorry, I have to take my grandma back.” Alex says, without even looking at him. Shane feels his stomach drop.

“Don’t be silly young man, I can spend the night here. I did say only take me back if you weren’t busy. Sounds as if you are now.” She smiles at Shane who attempts to return it but finds that he can’t.

Before Alex can respond he says, “I don’t want to mess with your plans. We probably won’t start for a few hours so… If you have time? I don’t even want to be there.”

_Yoba, why the fuck did he say that?_ Because it was true? Because he was terrified that Alex wasn’t making eye contact with him now because he’d crossed the line with that “taking care of you” line.

Alex nods, gives him a tired look, and then rolls up the window and leaves.

_He’s not coming_ , Shane thinks. His catalogued images of off-balance blushing Alex flush out of his head and he dips right down into the guilt. The cost of his pleasure catching him with empty pockets.

* * *

It is only when she halfway to the farm that she realizes that in her attempt to escape the realities of Penny/Sam weirdness, the mournful cloud over her head spelling _doom_ , and that other wiggling part of her mind saying _none of your business_ , she has trapped herself with the farmer.

Ry hasn’t said anything, seems fine in silence. Maru prepares to let it encompass her whole. Not in the chaotic bustle of the town anymore, the pressure in her chest starts to loosen.

“You alright?” Ry says, contradicting Maru’s diagnosis of the situation with a willingness to speak.

She just nods and turns to examine the woods around them. She is not yet willing to speak, feels too muddled in the events and non-events of the day (and of the week, the season, the year and the ones before it). She tries to focus on something tangible and comes to realize she hasn’t walked down this exact pathway in many years.

The trees are somewhat taller, the leaves turning colour and falling, the breeze rustling branches and wisping up both their hair.

They keep walking, Maru trailing only slightly behind. She looks for more tangible things, finding peace in natural facts. The colour of plants dying back for winter, the compact dirt path, the scuffs on Ry’s boots, the grey of Ry’s hoodie counter the dark of her hair, the tan skin of her neck.

When she looks at Ry as a whole Maru notes the unequivocal fact that the farmer is attractive.

The fact just sits there in her head, like all the other facts of the world she’s been listing. It gets no special attention, she turns to listing other things; the blue of the sky, the chirp of the birds, the smell of decomposing leaves and wood, the gentle nip of the air.

_The hairs at the nape of her neck the perfect length for wrapping fingers in._

_Her ear lobes with plain every-day hoop earrings the perfect size for the tip of her tongue to slip through. Her ear lobes? Noticing this, just another type of fact._

_Soft slope of her cheek bones, her jaw, the length of her nose with freckles from the sun. Her eyes surprisingly stormy, the curve of her upper lip._

Maru has to drop her eyes now.

But there’s

_the hands. Not small like her own, strong, elegant in that strength, but rough too._

The fact expands, accumulates new facts, and then, all of a sudden, creating response. Maru’s pulse is quickening, her mouth is dry, her hands suddenly craving purpose.

Just facts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is wayyy too much going on in this chapter and apparently nothing I could do about it


	13. Chapter 13

He wants to be at Ry’s and not in the din of the saloon. What he doesn’t want is to have to explain himself. Why his heart is choosing Ry over Sam and Abbi, his longest and closest friends. Doesn’t want to explain it to his parents, doesn’t want to explain it to Sam or Abbi, doesn’t want to explain it to himself. The only person he knows he won’t have to explain anything to is Ry and he feels his insides being wrenched with guilt because of this. What is wrong with him to make him a worse friend to someone more understanding?

He sits in the mould of his former self, making jokes with Sam and pretending Abbi isn’t entirely uninterested in them both, pretending that Penny and Maru are a regular part of the trio despite the mathematical impossibility.

Sam does most of the talking without seeming to feel any of the oddness. Maru says next to nothing, Sebastian’s surprised she’s here. She seems to have her eyes on Penny, watching for something Sebastian doesn’t know about.

At a certain point Abbi disappears from them. Quietly, naturally, like maybe she’ll come back. But she doesn’t. For most of the rest of the night she’s at the bar talking to Emily, Clint, with some tourists passing through.

Sam gets called over to be with his parents and their friends, promising to return soon. Maru tries to talk to Penny once he leaves but she’s halfway through a sentence when Penny’s up and excusing herself to the washroom.

She doesn’t come back and neither does Sam. Instead Penny goes to where he’s entertaining and he wraps a casual arm around her waist.

Maru sees it first, shakes her head.

“I’m going.” She says, getting up and wrapping her coat around her shoulders.

“Can’t stand hanging out with just me?” He means it as a joke.

She shakes her head again, “can’t stand watching.” She doesn’t elaborate, just leaves him to observe on his own.

* * *

When she had been in Ry’s kitchen she couldn’t speak. Her tongue had been glued to the back of her teeth.

She had taken the basket of cranberries into her hands and stood there waiting while Ry had rummaged around looking for some other gift, contemplating her sudden and keen desire to be pushed into the wall and kissed senseless. There were so many sensory facts she didn’t have access to yet; what would Ry feel like against her, how soft was her mouth, what did she taste like, how hard did she kiss, what would she do with her hands, what sounds she would make –

“You alright?” Ry had asked her, eyeing her from where she stood across the kitchen. “You look kinda flushed.”

“Are your stitches okay?” Maru had blurted out. In attempt to cool her mind she’d tried focusing on the bandage that had become visible when Ry had pushed up her sleeves.

“Stitches? Oh, not totally busted. You did a good job.”

Praise was not what she needed (or it was, but not in order to escape).

“I wasn’t really supposed to.” Maru admitted, sounding sheepish but maybe that was more to do with what was currently occupying her mind.

“Do a good job?” Ry had been amused, had seemed amused most the time they were together and Maru couldn’t help wondering if it was because her new desire was plain on her face.

“Do it at all.”

“Really?”

“…I’m not technically qualified.”

“Oh?”

And then they’d talked about Harvey, and her job, and she’d been so desperate to get away from her own desperation that she’d started rambling about the past, trading one inner truth for another.

“I was always getting into it with the faculty at school, they didn’t like that I valued my own competence over procedure. I didn’t take it very well. I took it very badly actually, very badly. And it kinda ruined me.” And then she’d laughed this weird high pitched awkward laugh and _kept going_ , “and now I don’t really understand my place in the world, but my dad wants me to be incredible but I can’t be incredible in the way the world wants me to be, and my oldest friend hates me. So…”

“You’ll find your own way to be incredible, Maru.” Ry had said with this simple –possibly ironic but she couldn’t really tell- smile that made her feel weak and embarrassed.

“Sure,” Maru had said, “but I’m not right now.” It was just a statement, just a fact.

“You don’t need to be. In fact, it’s probably good to take a break from being exceptional every once in a while.” Ry had replied, that ironic quirk in her lip, in her eyes too. Maru hadn’t meant to come off sounding sorry for herself, but this twinge in her gut told her she had.

They’d walked back to the fair in silence and Maru’s intense feelings of desire were replaced by shame. She wasn’t supposed to talk about that stuff. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who failure destroyed so utterly – never mind the fact that she hadn’t exactly failed, just hadn’t succeeded in the way she’d envisioned – and she especially didn’t want to come off as someone sounding sorry for herself.

Why had she gone and let desire cloud her mind? If she hadn’t allowed that to happen she wouldn’t have been feeling so embarrassed, Ry wouldn’t be walking around _knowing_ how dumb and immature she was.

When they’d gotten to town Ry had taken the basket from Maru, saying she’d get it to Gus herself. She added to the load she was carrying easily, and it was clear she’d never needed Maru’s help which only made her feel more embarrassed.

But then Ry had said “if I had known all it took to get you on the farm was asking you to do stuff for me I would have done that a lot sooner.”

“You didn’t ask.” Maru said, promptly feeling stupid for it.

“Right… well, I’ve got more stuff you could offer to carry around for me. If you wanted to do that tonight.”

Maru’s entire body tensed, _was Ry propositioning her? Had she been reading Maru’s mind this whole time?_

But then she’d continued, “I don’t know how many people Shane’s asking over, but probably not many. And I’ll ask Sebastian, but maybe he wants to be with Sam and Abbi tonight.”

Relief and disappointment flooded Maru’s system, she could feel the chemical spill beginning in her chest and spreading outward. “Right, I might… be with Penny.” Maru frowned, not a very good excuse seeing as she’s already admitted to Ry that Penny hated her.

Ry had just smiled – the irony replaced by something Maru didn’t want to engage with – and then had gone on to make her delivery to Gus.

She was left standing there thinking _what the fuck?_

She didn’t know how long she just stood there, in the middle of the fair, before Sebastian found her. He was alone now, and seemed morose.

“What’s wrong?” He’s asked her before she could ask him.

“What’s wrong with you?” She’d said back.

She was expecting him to snap back and storm off but instead she’d sighed, “I don’t really like this festival.”

Maru nodded her agreement, and then they’d walked quietly to a less centralized part of the fair and tucked themselves into the shadows of the trees.

“Ry’s inviting people over tonight.”

He’d nodded.

“She invited you.”

He’d continued nodding.

“So are you going to go?” She asked a little too harshly. She wanted him to say yes, because if he went then it wouldn’t be so weird if she did. Not that she really thought she’d let herself anyway.

He’d looked her in the eye, sceptical. “Sam made me promise to meet him at the saloon.”

“Right. Tradition.” She felt like she’d lost something, like now the option of deciding not to go wasn’t even there, it was just _you can’t go._

“Are you going ?” He’d sounded suddenly interested and she’d avoided eye contact.

“I’ll probably try to hang with Penny.” She didn’t look at him so she didn’t know how he reacted to that.

* * *

“Alex?” A genuinely surprised voice sounds from the dark, then he sees the dim silhouette of Shane stepping out of the root cellar, his arms loaded with bottles of apple cider.

“I’m not too late, am I?” He says, shoving his nervous hands into his pockets.

“No.” Shane says flatly.

“Good, I wasn’t sure… traffic was bad.” He says it awkwardly. He doesn’t mention that he almost didn’t come, that all he could think about was how slimy the photographer had made him feel, but then after driving in silence for an hour his grandma had said “Shane seems to really like you,” and he’d gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white, and she’d kept going, said “he seems to really have built a life for himself” and Alex had taken too big a breath and said, “yeah,” and then she’d said “I’m glad you have a friend like that,” and he’d almost started crying because he’d never thought of Shane in that way before and he wished they actually were friends. He thought about it the whole ride back too, and then he’d started wondering how he could make it real.

“I didn’t think you were coming.” Shane says now, sounding somewhat aloof.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Alex says, trying to sound light, but really is wondering if maybe he shouldn’t have, if the invitation had just been an empty courtesy.

“You just…” Shane begins but trails off like it isn’t important, but Alex feels otherwise.

“What?” Alex takes a step closer, so he can see Shane more clearly through the dark.

Shane takes a moment to weigh his words, “you seemed uninterested when I mentioned it.”

“Oh…” Alex rubs the back of his beck impulsively, “I… yeah, that photographer guy really sucks.” He admits, not sure if Shane will take that as an explanation.

“Fuck, you don’t have to tell me. Ry almost cried of happiness when I told her we weren’t interviewing with him. Did he make you model for hours?” Shane’s aloofness melts and Alex feels his heart thump differently when _this_ Shane is standing in front of him.

“… He wanted me to take my shirt off.” Alex admits, half grinning half wincing.

“Serious?”

Alex nods.

Shane’s eyebrow lifts. “Did you?”

Alex jokingly shoves him and Shane almost drops his bottles. Reactively Alex reaches out to steady him saying simultaneously, “you wish.” Alex feels Shane’s intake of breath, his body tensing in his arms. He releases him. “Here, let me help you,” he takes half the bottles.

They take a few steps and then Shane pauses. “Did he cross the line? I mean he obviously crossed the line asking you to take your shirt off and being an unpleasant fuck-head, but like… are you good?”

This catches him off guard. It’s not that he wouldn’t think Shane would care about this kind of thing, he just doesn’t seem the type to verbalize concern or… anything serious.

“Yeah… Uh…”

“I’m sorry, I’m not really good at talking about this.” Shane says, and at first Alex thinks he’s trying to say _let’s drop the subject_ but then he says, “but we can. If you need. Someone. If you need someone to um, listen. Yep. Yoba, I sound like an awkward dad, I’m sorry.”

“A well-meaning dad, though.” Alex says quietly.

Shane looks at him and Alex gives a small smile back.

He looks away, shakes his head. “Yoba, I’m getting old.” They both start walking towards the bonfire, where Alex can hear people talking and laughing.

“You look good though.” He says it because he wants say something nice to him, and because in the dark, not facing each other, it feels easy. “And uh… I don’t think I need to talk about it, not right now. Thanks though.”

There’s a pause and he wonders if what he’s said is lost in the dark, but then Shane, with more softness than he would expect, says “anytime Alex.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is there going to be three chapters about a single day? quite possibly.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOL @ me forgetting to copy a third of the last chapter into my last post. Did my best to work it into this one!

When he can’t stand watching anymore he goes outside. Abbi’s already there, leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette. Dusk has always suited her. When she sees him she raises an eyebrow, holds out her cigarette as she exhales.

“I quit.”

She looks him up and down thoughtfully, then nods and looks out towards Dusty’s pen.

“You and him aren’t the same.” She states, and he wants to wince but holds it back.

“You aren’t either.” He shoves his hands into his pockets.

“You know you were always such dicks to me.” She says it like it’s almost amusing.

“Were we?” He’d never really thought about it, though he supposes she’s right.

She shakes her head, “yeah.” They both let that hang there in the air before she continues. Tossing her hair back like turning a page, “anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Does it not?”

“Why would it? You wouldn’t give me the time of day, now Sam won’t give you the time of day. What goes around… you know?”

She takes another drag and he stands there for too long without saying anything.

He shuffles uncomfortably, looking at his shoes. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

She laughs, “I don’t think it’s worth much.” She steps on the burning ember of her cigarette. “See you around.” And she leaves.

He stands against the wall of the Stardrop well into the darkness, thinking about what she’s said. Wondering about who he was in the past, the hurt he’d inflicted while inadvertently pursuing his own. He sneaks off only when he hears someone exiting the bar.

* * *

As he walks back to the fire to take his seat he tosses the sweater at him.

“What’s this?”

“You look cold.”

Shane says, trying not to sound any particular way about it, trying to sound like it’s inconsequential that he’d trudged all the way across the farm to his cabin to retrieve the thing because Alex looked like he _might_ have been cold. He wasn’t sure if the tense shoulders were due to a chill or nervousness, and only one of those he knew how to fix.

The sweater is oversized, one Shane hardly wears and is therefore in the least embarrassing shape, only a few tatters around the cuffs. Alex is broader and it fits him perfectly. He tells himself he didn’t fetch it for him out of some weird desire to see him wearing his clothes.

“Thanks man,” Alex says, shrugging it into place, his voice somewhat shy.

“Just don’t go calling me a terrible host.” Shane says, leaning back in his chair.

Alex smiles, looking into the fire and not at him. He finds himself smiling too.

At the beginning he’d thought nobody would show. Him and Ry had sat around that massive fire by themselves. They’d both slouched back with their arms crossed, staring into the flames.

“Nobody’s coming.” Shane had muttered after what could have been two hours or five minutes.

“Maybe not.” Ry concedes. They both knew the power of town tradition was strong, but they’d both thought at least _one_ person would show.

Then Marnie of Jas arrived and he’d felt stupid for not knowing that _of course_ those two would come.

Shane had settled in to thinking it would just be the four of them tonight. Ry would tell them some funny story and Marnie would tell a long-winded one about her goats, Jas would yawn, they wouldn’t get to bed late and it would all be alright.

But instead Leah, Harvey and Elliott had all showed up together. They brought more food with them, and a lot of laughter. Ry broke out her banjo and Leah and Elliott sang a horribly off-key but nonetheless enjoyable duet. Harvey’s pink face at being serenaded by Elliott was enough to make the night worth it.

He was a little surprised when Maru showed up without her brother, and he could tell by Ry’s face she was surprised too. Though she hid it well – hopping up to get her a seat in seconds, and quickly returning to host mode and ensuring everyone’s comfort.

Then Alex had appeared to him outta the dark. And he’d held Shane in his arms, only for a second and only because he was about to fall on his ass. And he’d said he’d looked good - Shane couldn’t find a reason for that one.

They’d broken off into groups at this point. Leah was showing Jas how to carve a stick with her pocket knife. Marnie was asking Elliott about his next novel, between her much too personal questions about his relationship, as Harvey listened in and blushed furiously. Ry and Maru had been speaking but Ry had gotten up to check something somewhere, and now Maru was staring sleepily into the fire, not seeming at all inclined to speak.

He wants to talk to Alex, but he doesn’t know what to say. Which feels utterly ridiculous considering he’d spent most of the evening sulking about how he wasn’t coming. Now he was here, and he was sitting beside him, and wearing his sweater, and he looked _so good_ in the firelight. Shane might venture so far as to say he looked _content_ , and that was _doing things_ to Shane’s insides.

Marnie and Jas leave first. Then Harvey and Elliott can’t keep their hands off each other for another minute and they go, Leah saying “you think they even make it all the way home before..?” Maru shaking her head, “that’s my _boss_ , I don’t need these images in my head.” Ry laughing, “as if they aren’t already,” Maru blushing.

Alex saying, “how long do I have to wait to walk home before the coast is clear?” In a voice that says he’s serious, but then cracking a smile and Shane laughing harder than he should, but still managing to say, “desperate to leave as soon as possible?”

“No.” Alex saying, looking him right in the eye.

Shane with no words of response, nobody saying anything for too long.

Leah clearing her throat, “I better get going too.”

“You sure?” Ry asking, smiling at her, “think you can find your way in the dark?” holding out her hand.

Leah takes it, “yes.” Fingers slipping through fingers, Leah leaving, going towards her home in the woods.

Shane wonders, _now what?_ It’s just the four of them, and none of them are particularly talkative people. He feels a mounting anxiety for the moment when Alex has to leave. He wants to say goodbye alone. Or he doesn’t want to say goodbye at all, but if he has to he doesn’t want it to be under anyone else’s eye.

Alex, still looking comfortable in his seat and not at all like he’s about to get up and leave, “you need help cleaning this up?”

“I think we’ve got it.” Shane says, but immediately thinks maybe he should have said yes, and then told Ry to leave it to them, and then he could have been with Alex alone… is it creepy that he’s planning things like this?

“I should probably go.” Maru says as she gets up from her seat, “my family probably thinks I’m dead.”

“I can walk you home,” Ry says, getting up as well.

“You don’t… need to.” Maru says, like she’s caught off guard. Ry ignores her and starts walking.

And now he’s alone with Alex.

They start folding the chairs away. The silence is companionable, and Shane finds himself working slowly, not wanting it to end.

But it does.

Alex rubs the back of his neck, “guess I should get going then.”

“Don’t know, Harvey and Elliott might still be at it. Right in the middle of your path home.” Shane says, and he _knows_ he’s standing too close, and he feels like he’s burning but he couldn’t possibly step away.

“Yeah, maybe.” Alex breathes, the words sounding half stuck in his throat.

He almost leans in. He almost does it.

But he can’t. He’s not sure. He needs to be sure.

“Think you can find your way in the dark? You need a lift?”

Alex exhales, and it sounds a little bit too much like relief for Shane to entertain anymore ideas of leaning in.

“I’ll be good.”

“Right, good. Uh, see you around then.”

Alex hugs him.

Just pulls him in easily and hugs him and then lets him go, and Shane can’t really tell but he thinks he might be kinda pink and then he says, “okay, bye!” and sounds a lot like a kid, and then his hands are shoved in his pockets, he’s walking off swiftly and swallowed him the shadows of the night. Still wearing Shane’s sweater.

* * *

Maru didn’t know what it was that had her walking towards the farm instead of going home straight after leaving the Stardrop. Maybe it was because she was feeling particularly forlorn about whatever the hell was happening, or not happening, with Penny. Maybe because she knew Harvey would be there, and that felt safe somehow. The embarrassment she felt at expressing her vulnerability to Ry was still strong, but it was beginning to be replaced by an anxiety she knew would only grow the longer she went without facing. She needed to feel how their dynamic had shifted, how much power or respect she’d lost.

So she ended up at the farm, in a seat by the fire, beside Ry. Who didn’t treat her any differently than she had before her pathetic admission earlier in the day. She found herself actually enjoying the evening, laughing at jokes, forgetting Penny and Sam.

When it started winding down though, she started to remember, she started to feel lonely in anticipation of being at home with her thoughts.

Ry offering to walk her home felt like _oh, now that we’re alone, here’s the pity._

Halfway back she’s tired of waiting for Ry to get to the speech, the soothing, whatever it would be. “You know I’m not really a fan of this macho act, I don’t need you to act like you can protect me.” Maru nearly spits.

“Macho act? Walking you home?” Ry asks, halfway between surprise and amusement.

Maru ignores her and grits forward, “I didn’t mean to tell you what I said before. Now you’re thinking that I’m this fragile thing that breaks whenever reality hits, and even if that’s true it doesn’t help me for you to be some kind of… buffer. Or whatever this is.”

Ry is silent a moment, for just long enough for Maru’s natural anger to ebb, and for her to have to force it forward.

“Why’d you come tonight, Maru?” Ry finally asks.

“I…” She wasn’t expecting this.

“Was it to tell me this?” Ry asks, and Maru thinks she might detect a hint of anger behind the usual easy tone.

“I don’t know why I came.” Maru says, honestly.

“So not to tell me this and not because you wanted to?” Ry’s words are quick and level.

She’s off balance, mentally stumbling to find her thread. She frowns, “I’m not… good, right now.”

“I’m getting that.”

There pace had been slowing throughout the conversation, but now Maru comes to a full stop. She can’t think of anything to say.

Ry turns to look at her, she’s smiling, though it isn’t exactly kind. “I like you, Maru. You’re kind of a dick, and you make it really hard to be your friend, but it kinda seemed like you had a good time tonight and I liked being part of that. Maybe I’m selfish. But that’s why I’m here right now… it’s not what you want, which is okay. I’ll go.” And she nods and then begins to walk off.

Maru reaches out and grabs Ry’s arm before she thinks, before she can consider how it looks that her emotions are a seesaw and entirely her master, “I keep fucking up. With you. I don’t want to.” It’s true. She’s off-balance, she’s forgotten already that what she’d said previously had felt undeniably true only moments ago.

Ry’s close, so close, and she wants her to lean in and kiss her. She wants to cover up everything she’s ever said.

Ry breaks her wrist out of Maru’s grip and takes her hand into her own.

“It’s not my job to sort you out.” Ry says, very softly, her breath against her face. And then she’s gone. Walking back towards her farm without another word.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:   
> discussion of explicit sexual acts

After the night at the saloon Sebastian had figured Sam would keep his distance. Not on purpose, but that it wouldn’t occur to him to seek him out. He’s not sure how he forgot about Sam’s constant need for an audience.

Alex is just leaving as Sam comes in.

“What is he doing here?” He asks, following Sebastian down the stairs without an invitation. Like old times.

“He’s here every week.”

“Yeah _why_?” His voice back to his teenage exasperation.

Seb just shrugs and powers up his computer. He makes no moves to be Sam’s host. _That will only make things weirder_ he tells himself, better to act like they always did.

Sam sits down and eyes him, leg predictably starting to bounce in agitation after only a moment.

“Crazy having the gang back together again, isn’t it?” He says to fill the silence.

“Hm?” He doesn’t look up from his screen.

“Me, you and Abbi!” Sam says, like it’s so obvious. And it is, but Sebastian doesn’t want it to be.

“Right.”

“We should do something together tonight. Pizza and pool?”

“I just ate. And I have work to do.”

“Yoba, you’re as down as always, haven’t changed a bit.” Sam grins at him, trying to provoke him.

Seb can’t look, feels a denial catching hot in his throat. Taking too long to swallow it down, “just busy.”

“Tomorrow. You, me, Abbi, maybe Penny.”

He knows that Sam wants him to ask about Penny, but he won’t give him that.

He doesn’t need to, Sam goes there on his own. “She’s kinda hot now, isn’t she? Penny, I mean, not Abbi. She’s hot too, but a little dark for me.” That stings Sebastian twice. He holds his tongue.

Sam goes on, “I fucked her you know. This summer.” His voice is musing, soft, more reflective than Sebastian would anticipate. “Right on the beach, at the luau. We weren’t in the middle of things, but like… if someone had walked over, they would have seen. _She wanted it._ It was her idea.”

“Sam, I really don’t need to know that my sister’s childhood best friend likes to have semi-public sex.” He says through gritted teeth.

“Why, you think it’s shameful?” There’s something coy in Sam’s voice, he looks straight at Sebastian, _into him_ , into parts of him he wants to ignore. He focuses on what he knows, that Sam needs validation. That Sam’s the one that thinks it might be shameful.

“It’s just not my business.” Seb looks back to his computer.

Sam’s voice goes far off, ruminative, “Connell was there. He watched. She liked that too.”

“Yoba Sam, I said it wasn’t my business.” Seb hisses.

“I thought you liked hearing this kind of stuff.” Sam still staring him down. At first Seb’s shocked, but then as the words settle in he feels himself darken. That seems to break the spell for Sam, and he has the decency to turn pink and look away.

“I want you to move back to the city.” Sam says quietly, looking at his lap.

Seb forces a laugh, “it’s not going to happen.”

They drop it after that. Sam goes back to his usual puppy dog self, and Seb grits his teeth and puts up with it because he doesn’t know what else to do, saying constantly to himself _he’s gone in a few days._

* * *

The test samples slip through her fingers and crash to the floor in a mess of liquid and glass.

“Didn’t mean to startle you.” Ry says, closing the door to the clinic behind her.

Maru stands there for seconds too long, lips fallen apart and making no move to clean up. She’s supposed to apologize for the other night, she’s supposed to run and hide, she’s supposed to do anything.

Harvey walks through the door.

“Morning Ry – Oh! What happened here?”

“I startled her doc, take it out of my bill.” Ry says smoothly before Maru can think of an answer.

“She didn’t, I just… clumsy this morning. Sorry.” She stumbles over the words. She doesn’t need Ry coming to her rescue.

“It’s only a few samples, nothing to worry about.” Harvey says, shrugging, turning to Ry, “let’s get those stitches out.”

They walk in the back and Maru hurries to clean up the mess. Her face starts to burn only after they have gone.

She hadn’t gotten out of bed the entire day after her confrontation with Ry, and she would have gone another day if her dad hadn’t insisted on her helping him in the lab. He’d given her a vague speech about “idleness making room for sickness”.

She hadn’t forgotten about Ry coming in for her stitches, but she had hoped she’d get the samples done before she got there and could have hidden in the back. She didn’t think Ry would be early, wouldn’t want to potentially have to linger in the waiting room while Maru sat behind the desk. _No way Ry would want that, she’d been clear._

She’d been jumpy with anticipation anyway. Then Ry _had_ shown up early. And she’d dropped the samples. She feels too lucky for Harvey being early too - the feeling of skimming against the reality in which he wasn’t tripling her anxiety. _What would they have said?_

After cleaning up Maru goes behind the counter, but hovers right by the door. She listens. Just when she hears Ry walk through to the front room she pushes herself through to the back, leaving only the swish of the door.

* * *

He gets a call from Shane first thing in the morning. He’s still swallowing his breakfast when he picks up the phone.

“Truck’s broken, come fix it.” His gruff command. None of his usual humour in his voice, but maybe this roughness was usual and the humour wasn’t?

“I’ll be there soon,” he says, caught off guard – feeling embarrassed about answering the phone with food in his mouth.

“Good.” Shane says, and then he hangs up.

Alex forgets about his half-finished coffee and quickly pulls on the first sweater he sees. He promptly rips it off again. _He can’t wear Shane’s sweater to meet Shane._ He’s barely taken it off since that night. The smell of it makes him feel calm and exhilarated. Which he could use right now, because now he only feels nervous.

Shane sounded upset, and for some reason he felt like it was his fault.

He tosses Shane’s sweater on the couch and pulls on one Evelyn had knit for him. Then he pulls that one off too because it makes him look like a nana’s boy and he doesn’t want to look like that right now. He settles on his forest green hoodie, it makes his eyes look good.

He tries not to focus on the fact that he wants to look good. Tries not to think about how he thought Shane was going to kiss him goodnight but hadn’t. He tries not to think about how that’s all he’s been thinking about since it had happened, or hadn’t happened.

He puts it out of his mind. He has work to do.

* * *

There’s nothing wrong with Shane’s truck.

Well, there might be, but Shane didn’t check. He just got itchy to do something.

Ry had come back from walking Maru home, hands in pockets, looking downwards. He’d been watching the dying embers of the fire, thinking about putting it out but in no real rush to. Thinking about Alex’s hug.

She’d come up and stared into the embers too. She lets out an involuntary sigh and he wonders if he should ask or not.

“What’s up?” He says, tentatively.

She just shakes her head, “see Alex off?”

“Yeah. He…”

She raises an eyebrow.

Shane clears his throat. “He went home.”

“I think he likes you a lot.” She states, plainly, like that could just be a fact that exists in the world.

“You do?” He asks quietly, with a lot more vulnerability than he would like.

She chuckles quietly and pats him on the back. “I’ll put this out, you go to bed.”

He feels a thrill at Ry being able to see something, between him and Alex. He wants to believe it, he wants it to be the thing that makes him feel sure. He goes to bed thinking maybe it will be.

When he wakes up he knows it isn’t. He spends two days thinking of four thousand different ways to know for sure. A thousand different yeses and a thousand different no’s, and a thousand different maybes, a thousand different lost chances. 

The only real way is to ask. He’s known that from the start.

When he’s still bleary from sleep and not conscious enough to talk himself out of it he calls Alex. He’s nervous, and when he gets nervous he sounds pissed off – he can’t ask him like this. Not on the phone. He makes up an excuse to see him in person. He winces at his own voice and hangs up before he can make it worse.

Then he has to wait.

* * *

When he gets to the farm he momentarily forgets about the work he came to do. Shane’s standing outside his cabin with a scowl on his face, thickly growing in stubble on his chin, looking like he needed another coffee. Alex wants to make one for him.

Shane nods at him curtly and Alex pushes that out of his mind. Neither of them say anything as Shane shows him to his truck.

Shane stands there with his arms crossed and Alex realizes he’s not going to tell him the problem so he pops the hood and starts checking it out.

“Uh…” Shane starts.

“Yeah?” Alex says, too quickly.

“Um… there’s nothing wrong with it.” Shane says slowly, shaking his head almost in disbelief. 

“Oh.” Is all Alex can think to say. Has Shane decided he just wants him gone? Even at the expense of his vehicle?

“Alex…” Shane starts, eyes moving from the truck to his face.

“Yes?” Alex breathes, _he’s so close, when did that happen?_

Shane grabs his fingers, lightly, not quite holding his hand, and just holds him there. Alex doesn’t move, his breathing going shallow. Shane seems startled by what he’s done, and stares at his hand on Alex’s skin.

He looks up, “um…” he swallows, Alex watches the bob of his throat. “Can I kiss you?”

Alex’s eyes snap up to Shane’s, his breathing seems to stop entirely, and his whole body seems to stop working except for the pump of blood he can feel in his ears.

Shane drops his fingers, “sorry, I…”

His body acts without his mind. In one movement he cradles Shane’s face between his palms and presses their lips together. Alex kisses desperately from the first moment of contact and every new sensation only increases his need. The feeling of Shane’s stubble against his face, Shane wrapping his arms firmly around his waist, the feeling of his own bubbling desire. He runs is tongue across Shane’s lips.

Shane is laughing with a ragged edge, “damn, eager are we?” Catching his breath.

“Yes,” Alex pants, kisses him again. “Aren’t you?”

Shane’s eyes darken and he only gives a half nod, but Alex can feel the depth of that affirmative.

“I wasn’t sure.” Shane says seriously, bringing a hand up to Alex’s cheek.

Alex exhales, closing his eyes, smiling, “but you are now?”

“Don’t know,” Shane says low against his lips, “maybe if you do that again.”

“Cliché,” Alex breathes, but does it anyway.

* * *

Somehow Sebastian does end up in the saloon with Abbi and Sam. Abbi sits on the couch and watches them play pool like she used to, and he beats Sam easily, again and again. He doesn’t care about winning, but it feels safer not to alter the routine.

Sam makes jokes and Abbi even laughs. Seb tries to catch her eye but she avoids it.

“No one’s beat your high score at Prairie King, Abbi.” Sam says, after buying them all another unnecessary round of beer.

“That’s because nobody ever plays that thing.” She says.

“Ry does, sometimes.” Seb says, without thinking.

“You hang around with her a lot?” Abbi asks, sceptical for some reason.

He shrugs.

When Abbi goes to the washroom he tells himself not to ask what he’s been thinking all night but he’s halfway through a third beer.

“Penny not coming?”

Sam’s setting up his next shot when he asks. He laughs and fucks it up, though he probably would have anyway.

Standing up straight he shakes his head, “nah. She’s fun, but I’m leaving and I don’t want her moping around over me any longer than she already has.”

Seb goes in to make his next shot, doesn’t look at Sam. “Not inviting her to live in the city?”

He can feel Sam’s frown without looking, “no man.”

He takes his shot and sinks three balls.

Later, they’re sitting in a booth and Sam’s hand is on his thigh. He knows it’s the alcohol, but he doesn’t move it.

Sam doesn’t notice but Seb knows that Abbi is picking up on something between them. She gets up, “I think I better head home.”

“You should stay.” Seb says, a little more forcefully pleading than he intended.

She looks at him with sad eyes that seem too-knowing. “Sorry Seb,” she’s already pulling her coat on, “I’ll see you later.”

After, when they’re outside alone, Sam pushes Seb into the wall of the saloon and licks his neck.

He feels the desire, the feels the want, and for a second he thinks maybe it can take over. At least while it’s happening. But he’s already miserable about it, before it’s even begun. He’s not under Sam’s thumb, and he realizes he can’t be anymore. The thrill of that spell was so much easier, but it’s worn off.

“I can’t.” Seb says, not pushing him off but staying rigid.

“Come on,” Sam breathes in his ear, “I want to see if you like it like she does. Right here in the open.”

Seb shakes his head, puts his hand firmly on Sam’s chest. “not anymore. I told you already.”

Sam takes half a step back, incomprehension all over his face. “Yeah but, we’re cool now.”

“Not that cool.” He leaves without looking back.

* * *

She finds Penny by accident. She’s crying.

She’s sitting on a beach near the community center, one tucked in the lengthening shadows of dusk. She’s turned towards the surrounding line of trees, hardly visible. It’s her own attempt to be unnoticed that brings her to Maru’s attention, she scooting further away providing the subtle inch of movement that draws her eye.

Maru hesitates. She could leave her. At this point, she even wants to.

She goes anyway, sits on the bench beside her. Only because she kind of wants to hear Penny tell her to fuck off, so she can feel even more righteous in her misery. Penny just keeps sobbing, not looking at her.

Maru waits for the “fuck off” for a long time. When it never comes and she knows it won’t, she puts a hand on Penny’s back.

“Can I do anything?”

Penny laughs through her tears, though perhaps it is only harder sobbing.

They sit like that for a long time, until Penny starts to quiet down.

“Is it Sam?” Maru asks, and Penny’s sobs return to their previous fervour. “I’m sorry, Pen.” She adds, not sure if she’s sorry for bringing up Sam or sorry about him.

Penny starts hiccupping, “I’m not sorry” hiccup “I’m just” hiccup “mad.” She seems to find some resolves then, closing her eyes and focusing very hard on her breathing, stopping the hiccupping through force of will. “I’m mad.”

“Okay.”

Penny straightens in her seat and wipes her eyes, “I’m mad at everything and everyone, and I think I might break open because I can’t contain all this anger in one body.” Penny’s voice is hard, taking a deeper cadence than she’s ever heard it.

Maru digs in her pockets for a tissue, but she already know she’s doesn’t have one. Penny pulls one out of her own pocket, blows her nose.

“He said I was too much. _I’m_ too much. Bookish Penny, poor Penny, Penny who’s never getting out of town, Penny with no friends, is too much for a big time city boy in a band. Doesn’t like to think of me liking the things I like.” She lets out a derisive laugh, then adds darkly, “though he surely liked them well enough himself.”

“He’s a shit, Penny. Worthless.” Maru says, shaking her head.

“Yes. I know. That doesn’t make me feel better, if anything it makes it worse. Because I’m susceptible to shit, knew the whole time it was going to be shit, and still, here I am.” Penny laughs harshly and blows her nose again.

“Well… I’m glad that you know.” Maru sighs.

“I don’t need your fucking pity.” Penny spits out. She realizes now she doesn’t want the _fuck off_ to come anymore.

“You don’t have it. Not even a little. I never liked Sam.” Maru says honestly.

“Shut up, Maru, just shut up. You fucking left, you have no idea what it’s been like for it to just be me here.”

Maru feels stabs of guilt, but there’s nothing she can do about it. “I thought you didn’t want my pity.”

Penny shakes her head and glares at the ground, “I don’t. I want things to be different.”

Maru stands and holds out her hand to Penny, “so let’s make them different.”

Penny moves her glare up to her face.

“Come on, I’ll get you home.” She knows Pam won’t be there, she’ll be in the early hours of her evening drinking.

She doesn’t accept her hand but she does get up. Maru isn’t sure if Penny wants her to walk her home, but she doesn’t say otherwise so she continues on with her in silence. By now it’s dark and they don’t really have to see each other, which makes it easier.

When they get near the trailer Penny stops abruptly, startling Maru. She follows her line of sight, and there’s Sam, leaning again Penny’s home, sprawled out. He gets up clumsily when he sees them, needing he wall for balance. It’s clear that he’s been drinking.

He’s smiling, easily.

Maru looks to Penny, to see her reaction, but she’s only frozen.

“Penny, Penny, I’m sorry about earlier. I spoke too soon.” Sam says, that careless smile radiating off of him.

“Fuck off, Sam.” Maru says to him, she can hardly believe his audacity. She feels fury begin to spark inside her.

He grins at her, stopping only a moment. Then he looks back to Penny, stepping very, very close. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

“Penny, let’s go inside.”

Penny’s lower lip is trembling, and there are tear tracks still visible down her cheeks.

Maru doesn’t know what to do, how to make this better. “Go away Sam.” She says very quietly.

Without stepping away from Penny he says, “you can come too, Maru. Penny likes an audience.”

Something in Penny snaps and she shoves Sam off. He’s so startled he stumbles back and almost falls. “Leave me the fuck alone.” She hisses, grabbing Maru’s hand she stomps up the steps to her trailer and pulls them both inside, only letting go of Maru to slam the door behind her. She leans against it, hands tearing at her hair and letting out a furious groan.

“Why are boys so stupid!” She yells, not with her usual eloquence but with a lot of emotion.

Maru’s own heart is beating rapidly. She doesn’t know what to say, what it means that she’s been dragged in here.

She settles for saying, “he’s fucked.”

Penny groans again, then pushes off the door and huffs past her, entering her bedroom. She leaves the door open so Maru follows, gets in the room in time to see Penny throw herself head first into her bed.

“He’s an idiot, I can’t believe… I can’t believe he did that. I can’t believe my brother was friends with that asshole for like twenty years.” Maru continues, the tirade flowing easier now that she’s started.

Penny turns so she’s face up.

“He’s so stupid he doesn’t even know he’s stupid, I’m-”

“Maru,” Penny says, starring at the ceiling, “go home.”

“Oh… Yeah.” Maru says, and she stands there a moment, wondering if any of this is _real_. It doesn’t dissolve, so she turns to walk out. She stops at the door, she wants to say something more, she wants to say _I’m proud of you Penny_ but what would that mean?

She says nothing, leaves Penny in the dark, staring despondently at her ceiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much to everyone who's been sharing the love for this story <3


	16. Chapter 16

_You say gemstones aren’t your thing anymore, but maybe this still is? Seb told me you’d like it, blame him if you don’t. Sorry for how harsh I was the other night._

_yours, Ry_

Yours.

Maru had woken up earlier than she usually would that morning. In fact she hadn’t slept much at all. Since the incident with Penny and Sam she found herself restless, unable to focus on anything, even sleep. Thinking maybe cold morning air would help, she’d opened her door to outside. Waiting for her was an insulated container with this note tapped to the top.

She’d stared at it a good while before picking it up and bringing it into her room. Opening the container she was met with the delicious aroma of still warm rhubarb pie. Still a favourite, Seb hadn’t been wrong.

Where had the farmer gotten rhubarb at this time of year? Why had she gone to the effort of making Maru an entire pie?

She holds the note in her hands, just looking at it. Reading it and rereading it, wondering if some other message will reveal itself. A part of her feels hotly embarrassed, wants to toss the pie into the woods and light the note on fire. Ry shouldn’t be apologizing. She shouldn’t be asking about what she likes from her brother. She shouldn’t be _reminding_ her of that night. The fact that it’s her favourite pie somehow makes her feel even more angry.

The looming shame of that night had subsided only due to the surprising evening with Penny, but it was still there. Lurking.

She takes a deep breath. Obviously it was still lurking in Ry’s mind too. Otherwise she wouldn’t have done this.

Maru bites her lip, thinking, before she folds the note and slips it into her pocket. She can examine it further later. She takes the pie to the kitchen.

“I didn’t realize you were baking.” Her mom says, coming into the kitchen to refill her coffee.

“I didn’t. Ry made it.” Maru cuts it into eight equal pieces.

Her mom pauses in her pouring, “Ry?”

It takes a lot for Maru not to wince, she can say the fact of it easily, but if her mom starts asking for nuance...

She shrugs, carefully removing a piece onto her plate and hoping this conversation won’t go further.

“She’s always so generous.” Her mom muses.

“Do you want some?” She wonders if Ry had intended her to share it, what she’d been intending at all? She lifts the first forkful to her mouth.

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s still some corn blobfish risotto left.”

Maru’s fork stops before reaching her mouth at the comment, she scowls at her mother who laughs guiltily.

“I’m sorry, you enjoy. I might try a slice after lunch.” And she heads out of the room, back to work.

Maru closes her eyes and gives her taste buds full attention. She is not disappointed.

* * *

“Abbi, Abbi!” He yells, pulling the carton of cigarettes from her hands and lifting it out of her reach, “you know these things will kill ya!”

Despite everything, despite time, she laughs like he was always able to make her do. She shoves him hard, put playfully. Sam exaggeratedly stumbles, then bounces back and locks her in a headlock. Seb feels a pang of something that might be nostalgia.

After they finish tussling, Sam slams his last bag into the trunk of his fashionable shit box of a car. He’s leaving the day before Spirits Eve. It felt like they should remark on this. It felt like he should at least be able to give them this holiday, even if none of them want it. Nobody says anything.

"My two best friends.” Sam says, beaming at them, and Sebastian can tell from the look on his face he really thinks that’s what they are. That the past remains crisp and pure, untainted by more recent events. Untainted by reality.

He pulls them with either arm into a brief hug. Abbi has to hold her cigarette smoke in her lungs until he releases them, then blows it sideways.

“Hope to see you both in the city soon!” Sam gets in the front seat and drives off, waving, smiling.

Sebastian can’t tell if this feels like the first time Sam left them, or if that’s only because they all wished it did.

They stand there silently until he’s driven off.

“Cheer up Seb, I’ll buy you a beer.” Abbi says, stubbing out her cigarette with her boot.

* * *

He’s halfway through making dinner when there’s an abrupt knock on the door. He assumes it’s Robin, or maybe Demetrius.

He opens it hurriedly, wiping his hands on a dish rag. Already halfway through saying hi before he registered who it is.

The greeting dies in his throat. He stands there with his mouth open. He closes it.

Shane runs a hand through his hair, “I was walking by... I thought... We haven’t spoken since...”

Alex tells him to come in. Shane silently accepts, steps into the house, giving him a funny look. He realizes he’s wearing Shane’s sweater. He feels himself turn red and wants to make an excuse but he can’t think of anything.

“I’m just making dinner,” he says instead, “do you want to stay?” Alex had prepared for this in his head. He wanted to make him dinner, but he’d hoped it would a meticulously planned thing. Not a thrown together meal for a lone bachelor.

“No.” Shane says quickly and Alex feels disappointed. “I mean...” Shane starts, then stops.

_He’s nervous._ Alex realizes, and it’s strange, how he’s never really thought of Shane ever being nervous.

He’s not sure why either of them feel so awkward. Alex had betrayed his desires rather openly the last they’d seen each other. Shane had asked for them. He is suddenly afraid that Shane wants to take that back.

“I think your dinner is burning.” Shane says.

Alex jumps to acting, turning dials, stirring, not looking at Shane.

When he turns Shane is staring at him.

“You should keep it.” He says, looking away. _Does he mean the sweater? He must._

“I meant to return it.” Alex says, feeling very embarrassed.

“It fits you better than me.” Shane mumbles, still not looking.

“Okay.” Is all he can think to respond. He is waiting for something, he doesn’t know what. The air is horribly tense. The silence between them extends, the longer it goes the more blank his mind is. The smell of burnt dinner is in his nose.

Shane runs his hands through his hair again, “I got Jas signed up for dance class at the community centre.”

“That’s good.”

“I think it’s good.”

“You said she needed something like that, the day when we ran into each other there.”

“You remember that?” Shane raises an eyebrow. Was it so long ago he should have forgotten? Or so mundane? It hadn’t felt mundane to him.

“That was the day my gran said you should take care of me. I was pretty embarrassed. It’s kinda seared in my mind now.” He forces himself to sound light, like it was a funny and inconsequential moment.

“That’s what made me...” He stops short.

“Made you what?”

Shane shrugs, makes a vague gesture between them “y’know.”

“So...” Alex says, gripping the counter his one hand, rubbing the back of his neck with the other, “this is like... still, or, I don’t mean still, it’s...” He gives up.

Shane’s terse look has faded, he looks vaguely suspicious. “You remember some random conversation we had months ago but not what I said to you yesterday?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says emphatic, earnest, “you’re hard to read. Or I’m afraid of misreading. It’s been a long time. Am I supposed to admit that?”

Shane laughs, “I don’t know.”

They both get quiet after that, but it’s not as tense as before. Alex wants to hear him laugh again, wants to tell him how much he likes it.

“This is dumb...” Shane starts, “but... do you want to go to Spirits Eve with me?”

Alex laughs this time, flooded with relief. “Yes. I do.”

“I know it’s not the most romantic thing in the world.”

“I don’t know. There’s lots of dark corners to get lost in.” Alex can’t suppress his grin, especially not when Shane’s cheeks turn slightly pink.

“I’ll meet you here.” Shane nods, looking at him in half wonderment.

Alex has to look away from that and nods at the floor, still smiling.

* * *

Whenever he thinks about that night he feels the embarrassment as intensely as if it had just happened. How quickly he’d fallen to his knees. How over eager he’d been to do what he’d been dreaming of for so long, how much he had loved it. How stupidly broken he had been when it revealed itself to be real, not dreamlike at all.

“So you sucked his dick only to find out he’d never do the same for you?” They’re tucked into a dark corner of the saloon, their first round downed and the second halfway to it.

“No. Well, yes.” There had been other steps, other fumblings, subtleties to be misinterpreted, but essentially, she was right.

“That’s rough.”

“Yeah, well…” He pushes his hair out of his face and then lets it flop back.

“I could have told you that’s how it would go.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She shrugs, half grinning, “because I was in the same position with you.”

His eyes widen, “what?”

She laughs, “oh, shut up. You had to have known. I followed you like a puppy. I would have easily sucked your dick and been left in a heap by you.”

He shakes his head, “no. I didn’t know.”

She pouts, “too blinded by love for Sammy then?”

He tries to scoff but he can’t make eye contact with her. He’d never imagined Abbi would be his confidante about all his stupidity with Sam. He breathes out a long exhale, noticing he does feel better, getting it out there.

“What about you then?”

“What about me?”

“What’s it been like, being away?”

“It’s been up and down.”

“And are you up or are you down now?”

She frowns, “it’s hard to say.”

He sighs, nodding slowly, “I know what you mean.”

They sit in silence. He feels like he has to return the kindness of letting him vent but he doesn’t know how to say it without it sounding forced.

He tries anyway, “if you want to talk about it…”

She smiles, but it’s more of a grimace, “I don’t.”

He nods.

“Not right now anyway. Do you have any more boy drama to distract me with?”

“Afraid not.”

They sit in silence again and it’s not uncomfortable.

After a minute of Abbi people watching she says, “the farmer is kind of hot, isn’t she?” Sebastian follows her eye line, seeing Ry talking with Emily at the bar, leaning against the counter casually.

“She’s cool. I think she’s kind of got a thing for Maru.” He says absently. He’d noticed her looks, the way she asks about her while being careful to sound like she’s not actually asking about her.

Abbi’s eyebrows shoot up, “really? And how does Maru like that?”

Seb shrugs, “I don’t think she’s noticed.”

“I guess Maru’s never really lived on earth, has she?”

Seb scrunches his face, “it’s not that… I don’t know. Since we’ve both been back, she’s… she’s different.”

“You sure it’s not that you’re actually taking the time to talk to her and not immediately writing her off as an annoying little sister?”

He scoffs, “no. She _was_ annoying. And not on earth, like you said. But driven, always. Now she’s… absent, but not like she’s in space, more like she’s nowhere.”

“Do you think she’s depressed?”

He pauses. He had avoided putting a word to it until then and didn’t want to now. But the more he thought about it. “Yeah… I think she is.”

“And does that make you insecure, knowing you’ll have to compete to be the most angst-ridden kid in the family now?”

“Abbi!”

She cackles with laughter, “sorry, sorry, I couldn’t resist.” She calms down after a second, “in honesty that sounds pretty concerning. Have you said anything to her?”

“Nothing specific. But we’re getting along better.”

“Maybe you should tell her about the farmer’s crush.”

“Because love fixes everything, right?”

“Right.”

“I think I’ll let her figure that one out on her own time.”

* * *

Shane and Ry walk to the festival together. He feels twitchy with nerves. Why did he decide something so public for his and Alex’s first date? What if it went horribly wrong, and everybody saw? Even if it didn’t go horribly wrong, people would be watching, be curious, wonder why someone like Alex would waste their time with someone like him.

“You’re more taciturn than ever.” Ry states.

“No I’m not,” he grunts. He’s like this all the time, they both know it.

“Okay, well, I hope you at least attempt basic conversation with Alex.”

“How did you know?”

She grins, “a guess. Seems I was right.”

He sighs, “I don’t know if I can stand everyone knowing.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder, “you don’t have to tell them. It’s a dark and spooky festival, people will be distracted.”

He doesn’t believe her, but he tries to.

“Take your time, Shane. Go at your own pace.” She pats him on the back. Then more quietly she adds, “though looks like someone else might be a little eager.”

His head snaps up to where she’s looking, and there’s Alex walking towards them through the dark path. His pace is slowing to a pause, like he’s afraid maybe he shouldn’t be there.

“Hi Alex!” Ry greets brightly.

“Hi,” he says weakly, nervous. Shane can’t bare to look at either of them.

“I’m afraid I said I’d meet Leah promptly at the beginning of the festival, so I gotta rush. See you two around!” She calls, already rushed past both of them and disappearing into the approaching festival glow.

Shane and Alex stand across from each other. Why is he still so nervous? If anything, he’s even more nervous. Since Alex had kissed him like that... he can barely stand to sit still. He spikes between elated and terrified he’s going to fuck it up.

“Am I late?” He asks, knowing he isn’t.

“No...” Alex rubs the back of his neck, “I just thought I’d rather meet you here. Is that okay?”

Shane nods. He wants to ask why, but he can’t.

They fall in step beside each other and start walking towards the festival. Shane braces himself as they approach. Will it be easier or harder to be with Alex out there?

He feels the gentlest tug on his sleeve and responds immediately. They both stop and Alex looks up at him, gives him a small smile, and without saying anything kisses him once briefly on the lips.

Shane feels himself unwind.

It will be fine. It will be perfectly fine.

* * *

“You coming?” Sebastian asks. She’s sitting in the kitchen, eating the last slice of pie. Robin and Demetrius have already gone down to the festival, she said she’d follow soon after. She thinks she’d meant it.

“Why wouldn’t I?” She asks after a moment, forking another bite into her mouth.

He pauses a second. “You tell me.”

She chews slowly, contemplating him.

“Why are you being like this?” She asks with a mouth full of chewed up pie.

“Like what?”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“You’re the one being like something.”

“What’s something?”

He sighs heavily, rubbing his hands across his face. “Maru, you’re sitting in the dark eating pie by yourself.”

She swallows her last bite, “so?” She puts her fork delicately down on her plate.

“It’s not like you.”

“What am I like? What am I supposed to be doing?” She keeps her tone disinterested.

He shakes his head, “let’s walk down together.”

“Yes, brother.” She says, getting up in sardonic obedience and walking past him out of the room. He follows her silently, she can feel his eyes burning questions into her back.

The question he asks is one she never expected.

“Have you seen Penny?”

She freezes. He stumbles trying not to run into her.

“What?” She says softly, looking at him.

He brushes the hair out of his face, gives her a look that pleads _don’t make me say it_.

“Sam is fucked.” Maru grits out her teeth, “you know that, right?”

“Yeah.” He nods, “I know.”

“Then how the fuck have you been friends with him so long?”

He laughs in self deprecating way, doesn’t answer. They start walking again. Maru doesn’t know why he brought this up, or why he would do it _now._

He asks, “is she okay?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that so instead asks, “do you know what he did?”

“More than I would like.” He admits, solemnly.

Neither of them say anything more after this, but it weighs on Maru’s mind the entire walk down. When they get to the festival it’s already in full spooky swing. The maze is standing as tall and daunting as ever. Vincent and Jas have attacked the Jack’o-’lantern making station, pumpkin guts spilling out on the ground. Lewis hovers about anxiously trying to get them to reel it in, worried about slipping hazards. Marlon cackles ominously whenever someone gets too close to one of the reanimated skeletons.

Abbi is standing by the saloon, observing the goings on with skeptical neutrality.

“Beat the maze already?” Seb asks her, as they approach.

She shakes her head no, “how many times can a person get stopped by the same spiders before they realize they should find a new challenge?”

“Your new challenge is standing by yourself in the shadows?”

She glares at him, “no, it’s talking to you.”

Maru snorts despite herself.

“Don’t work too hard, I’m going to say hi to Ry.” Seb says dismissively, but it’s clear he enjoys Abbi’s snark.

Maru wonders if she’s supposed to follow, if it’s weird that she stays with Abbi in the shadows. But going to Ry isn’t an option. She has her note in her pocket still. She doesn’t know how to breach that topic, only that she will have to at some point.

She shuffles awkwardly, wondering if she should go find something else to do. Abbi doesn’t react, just lights a cigarette and keeps her silence.

“So Sam left.” Maru says, because it’s still on her mind, because maybe Abbi can tell her something else.

Abbi rolls her eyes, “thank yoba.”

“I thought you were best friends?”

“We would have said that once.”

“I’m glad he’s gone.” Maru admit, partially to test Abbi’s reaction.

She eyes her curiously, “for your brother’s sake?”

“What?”

Abbi doesn’t miss Maru’s surprise. A quiet smile crosses her face, she nods slowly, looking over to where Sebastian is joking around with Ry.

“He’s changed a lot, hasn’t he?” She says after a moment.

Maru nods, still watching her brother. Ry sees her watching and flashes her a bright smile. This flusters her, she doesn’t know what to do. She looks at her shoes.

She should go over and say thank you. She should go over and say, _what the hell are you doing, scolding me and then giving me my favourite pie?_ It’s too mixed up. She doesn’t know how to react.

She notices Abbi watching her strangely and she tries to brush it off.

“I’m gonna go get food.”

She’s not hungry though, and ends up staring at Gus’ masterpiece of a feast without desire. She takes a glass of pumpkin juice.

Penny gives her a tight smile from across the table. She doesn’t think it’s warm enough to warrant an approach, but it’s not nothing. Penny looks tired. She seems like she’s consciously clutching herself together, the emotional force pulling her thin body in on itself. Her face is pale. But she’s here, at the festival, and she’s eating. This isn’t nothing.

Maru guzzles her pumpkin juice, wondering what the hell to do now. Maybe she could get lost in the maze by herself for awhile. She lets her eyes scan over the scene. Seb has returned to Abbi’s side without Ry. Her parents are cozied up together, looking very much like they didn’t want to be disturbed. Marnie walks past Lewis like he’s a stranger and he follows her movements with a kicked puppy look on his face. She sees Ry disappear into the maze.

Or she thinks she does at first, but then she snaps her attention back to where she saw Ry disappear. It looked like she didn’t go through the entrance to the maze, but skirted around it, dove right into the hedge itself.

_Why would she do that?_ Does she desperately need to make it to the community centre?

Casually she makes her way over to inspect. The hedge around the outskirts of the maze is thick and dense, but there is a small space someone could have shoved themselves through if really determined. Some of the twigs and branches on the hedge look snapped or bent from someone doing just that. She finds herself pushing into the hedge before she even considers how much she doesn’t want a confrontation with Ry.

At first it seems like she’s pushing around the outskirts of the hedge, like it will open up and she’ll be near the community centre, but instead of opening up the hedge consumes her. The only available path is _in_ it. It’s dense, dark, she gets scratched, she keeps going.

She only realizes what she’s done when she hears voices.

“Look, can’t you help me with this? I help _you_ all the time-” The sound of Ry’s voice stops her short, somehow it surprises her. Despite following her she hadn’t anticipated actually finding the farmer. She’d expected to be wrong and crawling around in a hedge for no reason. Until this moment, that had made more sense.

“Ry, we must cease this conversation immediately. Your _friend_ has followed you and is about to emerge from the hedge. In fact she can hear us right now.” A deep voice Maru’s never heard before.

“My _friend_? What is your tone implying?” Ry’s whispering voice follows. There’s a pause, “I don’t see anyone.”

There is the sound of fabric swishing and mumbling. Maru strains her ears to hear better. Suddenly a force seems to lurch her from the navel forward and she finds herself tumbling through the hedge and falling to her knees.

“Eavesdropping is impolite, mortal.”

Maru has never seen the wizard before. She thought he was a rumour. She thought Lewis hired people from the city to setup this festival and told everyone it was a local magician to make it more appealing for tourists.

Maru is now looking up at him, his clipped purple beard oddly stiff in the breeze, eyes twinkling eerily like the stars in the sky behind him. He is immensely tall. Her mouth is agape. Ry is standing beside him, looking shorter than usual. Her muted earth-tone clothing a dull contrast against the wizard’s luminous purple. They make an odd pair, but it somehow doesn’t seem wrong.

For a moment Ry looks as shocked to see Maru as Maru is to see the wizard.

She blinks a few times, extracts her hands from her pockets and helps Maru up. One hand on her elbow, the other on her waist. Maru lets her do it.

“You’re a dramatic guy, Ras.” She says disapprovingly.

“I have no time for social niceties.”

“Don’t you have eternity?”

“Never mind. I must talk to Linus.” With a great swish of his cloak the wizard turns on his heel and marches into the darkness.

Ry rolls her eyes.

“The wizard is...”

“Kinda a dick, yeah.” Ry snorts.

“Real.” Maru finishes.

“Oh. You’ve never seen him?”

Maru shakes her head no.

“Huh. So many people say that. I guess he’s kinda reclusive.” Ry shrugs, and turns back to the hedge, guiding Maru with her.

“You sound like you know him well.” Maru says, trying not to pay attention to the fact that Ry hasn’t removed her hands from her.

“I guess.” Is all she says.

Maru hesitates, looks over her shoulder to where the wizard disappeared.

“What did you hear?” Ry asks, curious.

“N-nothing.” Maru mutters, her cheeks heating up. Being magicked out of a hedge had made her forget that she’d been following Ry. Sneaking. Spying.

Ry grins, “so do you usually like to stroll about through dense hedges?” It’s like she knows her exact train of thought.

“No...” Maru says, barely able to breathe. She doesn’t have an explanation, at least not a reasonable one. Ry’s going to think she’s even more out of wack than she already did.

But she doesn’t press. Only nods, still smiling like this is the funniest thing to happen to her all day. Maybe it is.

She lets Maru press into the hedge first, following close behind. To do so she lets go of her wrist, but the hand on her waist moves to her lower back, gently guiding her through the dark.

They continue on like this in silence. Maru can feel the hedge scraping her and snagging her clothes and hair. The darkness feels thicker with Ry behind her, like a pressure. The longer she waits for Ry to ask why she followed her the more intense it becomes.

She bursts under it, turning abruptly towards Ry.

“Thank you for your note. And the pie. You didn’t have to do that.” She says quickly, because otherwise she won’t at all, and this is better than saying she had no reason to follow her other than curiosity.

“Sure. No problem.” Ry says, and she’s looking past Maru, like she wishes she would turn around and keep walking.

“You were right though.” Maru admits.

Ry looks at her then. “I know.”

At first Maru feels a flare of anger. _Why apologize for being harsh if she hadn’t meant it?_ But she hadn’t apologized for what she’s said, just how she’s said it.

She swallows, whispers “I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know how to want to.” It feels safe to say because it is dark and they are literally inside a hedge. Like it won’t follow them out.

Ry’s breath seems to catch.

Maru forces a half laugh. “I don’t know why I’m always running my mouth when I’m with you. You make me nervous.” _Where the fuck did that come from?_

“Why do I make you nervous?” She says it very softly, gently curious.

Maru can’t reply. Instead she looks at Ry’s lips. She knows this is an answer in itself.

Ry doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, she waits.

The pressure seems to collect in swirls of air around them. Accumulating, becoming warm.

She hears the sound of footsteps on the other side of the hedge, someone screeching at some horror in the maze, the outside world.

Quickly, Maru turns around.

It feels like it should have happened, whatever had been about to, but her feelings are not facts. They walk the rest of the way through the hedge in silence. Maru feels the absence of Ry’s touch on her back the whole way, the whole night. It isn’t until much later that she begins questioning why Ry had crawled through an enchanted hedge to meet an actual wizard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do you think the wizard would be a good wingman?


End file.
